External Assessment: Choosing the Right Text Type
In preparation for the external assessment, students must produce a written response in the target language in a specified text type. A student chooses to write a persuasive letter to a local council about a community language program. The draft uses formal register, a clear position, and rhetorical questions, but the formatting follows an essay structure with no address, date, salutation, or sign-off. The content is accurate and the language is largely correct. The student argues that the letter's ideas are persuasive regardless of layout and that markers should focus on language.
1. How should the response be judged against the requirements for the text type?
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Text-type conventions are part of the assessment, not decoration.
What the criteria typically require: The response must be in the specified text type and demonstrate its conventions - for a formal letter, that includes an appropriate opening and closing, a clear addressee, and register suited to the audience.
The student's response: The register and persuasive purpose are appropriate, but the missing conventions mean the response only partly fulfils the text-type requirement. Marks for communicative purpose and text structure would be affected, while language accuracy marks may still be strong.
The student's argument: Persuasive ideas matter, but the task tests whether the student can operate within a real-world genre. A letter that is not laid out as a letter does not fully achieve its purpose.
Feedback: Show the student a model structure and explain which criteria were affected.
2. What should the teacher do to prepare students without giving an unfair advantage?
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Preparation must build genre knowledge without pre-writing the response.
Appropriate preparation: Teach the conventions of the required text types using unfamiliar topics; practise identifying audience, purpose, and register; give feedback on drafts of practice pieces in different text types.
Inappropriate preparation: Providing a template with fixed sentences, rehearsing a specific predicted prompt, or correcting a draft that is then memorised for the assessment.
Fairness principle: All students should have access to the same genre instruction and the same information about the conditions. If the teacher realises some students misunderstood the text-type requirement, the fix is to reteach the conventions to the whole class before the assessment, not to adjust marks afterwards.
Documentation: Keep a record of what was taught and when, so that the preparation can be shown to be equitable.