Original English
Does anyone care? Some of the holiday has been spent marking exams. I haven’t done that to the exclusion of other things, but I have maintained a reasonably steady pace and finished off Pre-AL α. The first writing task is (these days) usually a letter to a friend, which is designed to test pupils’ ability to write informal English. Usually the response is full of clichés and witless drivel, and I wasn’t disappointed. But this time something else was noticeable – memorised answers. A particular group of girls, who have possibly seen this topic before (from a certain source on line), all produced very similar answers in that what they wrote suggested a level of English beyond their present capabilities. I don’t know what the official view of such answers is. Perhaps if the answer responds to the topic, then recitation is perfectly all right; if the answer makes no reference to the topic, then there are problems. Most of the letters were related to the topic even although t...