The Near-Synonym Choice
In a vocabulary section, a candidate must choose the best word for each gap. Two items are revealing:
Item 1: "The manager asked the team to ___ the new policy before Monday." Options: (a) implement (b) make (c) do (d) perform. The candidate chooses (b) make.
Item 2: "Her explanation was so ___ that everyone understood immediately." Options: (a) clear (b) clean (c) obvious (d) transparent. The candidate chooses (c) obvious.
The candidate says both "sound right." The marker must decide what these choices show about the candidate's vocabulary knowledge.
1. Analyse what each wrong choice reveals about the candidate's word knowledge (collocation vs. meaning).
Read the worked answer
The two errors are different in kind:
- Item 1 ("make the policy") is a collocation error. "Make" is a high-frequency general verb, and the candidate has over-generalised it. English requires "implement a policy" (or "carry out"). The candidate knows the meaning of the sentence but lacks the verb–noun partnership - a collocational gap, not a comprehension gap.
- Item 2 ("obvious") is a meaning-precision error. "Obvious" means easily seen/understood without effort; "clear" (the answer) fits "so ___ that everyone understood." "Obvious" is close but subtly wrong here - it implies it couldn't be missed rather than well-explained. The candidate is choosing a near-synonym by rough sense, not by precise fit in context.
So: one error is about which words go together, the other about fine meaning distinctions.
2. What single diagnostic question should the marker ask the candidate to separate these two weaknesses, and how would each answer be interpreted?
Read the worked answer
Ask the candidate to explain, in their own words, why they rejected the correct option for one item:
- "Why didn't you choose implement in Item 1?"
- If they say "I didn't know that word" → vocabulary size gap (unknown word).
- If they say "make sounded fine, I use it a lot" → collocation gap (known word, wrong partner). The second is the likely case given they didn't flag uncertainty.
- "Why not clear in Item 2?"
- If they say "obvious means the same thing" → near-synonym precision gap: they treat synonyms as interchangeable and need work on connotation and collocational fit.
Either way, the follow-up converts a bare wrong answer into a typed diagnosis (size vs. depth vs. precision), which is what placement needs.