School Assessment: Building and Defending Your Internal Folio
What internal assessment rewards
School assessment in Modern Greek Continuers is where consistent, documented work pays off. You are assessed on the four macro-skills through tasks your school designs: typically an oral presentation or interaction, a written response to a text or stimulus, a listening comprehension, and a reading/viewing task. Because weightings and task types vary by school, your first job is to know your own assessment plan: which tasks count, their weightings, and the text types each one requires.
Concepts you must control
Command vocabulary matters as much as grammar. Know the difference between describe, explain, compare, justify and evaluate, and match your response length and depth to the mark allocation. For written tasks, control of register is central: informal Greek for a message to a friend, formal Greek for a letter to a principal or an article. Learn the conventions of each text type - salutations, sign-offs, headings, paragraphing - because structure carries marks. Grammatical accuracy is assessed, so revise the areas that recur: aspect in the aorist versus imperfect, the subjunctive after να, genitive case after prepositions, and clitic pronoun placement.
Traps to avoid
- Answering in English when the task expects Greek, or drifting into English vocabulary mid-sentence.
- Ignoring the audience: a formal letter written in slang loses register marks.
- Under-developing: a two-sentence answer to a task worth substantial marks.
- Memorising a presentation but being unable to answer follow-up questions in the oral interaction.
Rule of thumb
For every written task, underline the key words in the prompt, note the text type, audience and purpose in the margin, then check your draft against all three before submitting. If your draft does not name its audience explicitly through register, revise it.
Worked example
Prompt: write an email to a Greek-speaking exchange host family thanking them and explaining what you found difficult. The task signals informal register, a greeting and sign-off, thanks, and a reflective explanation. A strong answer uses friendly plural address, past tenses for the stay, and structured paragraphs - one for thanks, one for difficulties, one for future plans.