The open letter that is good French but the wrong letter
Léa, a strong student in your Sec 5 enriched group, submits a 310-word open letter to the school newspaper arguing that classes should start at 9:15. The task required 250 words (±10%) in a formal register. Her letter opens 'Salut la gang,' and contains a clear three-part structure with varied, mostly precise vocabulary ('sommeil,' 'rythme circadien,' 'rendement'). Her thesis, however, only appears in the fourth paragraph; she mixes 'vous' and 'tu' within the same paragraph; she writes 'éventuellement' for 'eventually,' 'supporter' for 'to support,' 'd'avantage' for 'davantage,' and 'si l'école commencerait plus tard' - a structure she self-corrects correctly whenever you ask her to reread the sentence. The rubric weights message and coherence at 50%, language accuracy at 30%, and register and appropriateness at 20%. Your department caps written feedback at 150 words plus a mark out of 100, and allows one revision worth up to 10 bonus points.
1. Rank her errors for feedback. Which two do you treat first, which do you relegate to a checklist, and why?
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Priority one is the 'si + conditionnel' clause. Two reasons: it recurs in argumentative writing, and she already repairs it when prompted, which places it inside her zone of proximal development. Feedback that targets what a student can almost do produces change; feedback on what they cannot yet see does not.
Priority two is the register break - 'Salut la gang' followed by 'vous' and 'tu' in the same paragraph. In an open letter, address is a convention, not decoration, and it is worth 20% of the rubric, so it has earned explicit attention.
Relegated to a short checklist rather than prose explanation: 'd'avantage' (a spelling confusion, fixed by proofreading), and 'éventuellement' / 'supporter' (faux amis to be memorised as pairs, with a correct model sentence each). These are lexical items, not reasoning problems; a paragraph of explanation costs you words you do not have under the 150-word cap.
The misplaced thesis is not an error but a structural decision, and it should be named in the message-and-coherence comment, not in the language section. Keeping the two conversations separate stops her from reading the whole letter as 'bad French.'
2. Give a mark out of 100 with a defensible split across the three criteria, showing your reasoning for each.
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Message and coherence - 37/50. The content is on topic, the argument is supported, and the three-part structure is intact. Deductions: the thesis arrives in the fourth paragraph, which costs the reader, and the text runs 310 words against a 275-word ceiling, so concision was not controlled.
Language accuracy - 20/30. The text is dense and readable with a low error rate per hundred words, and the vocabulary range is genuinely strong. But two of the errors are in structures she demonstrably controls, which is what separates this from a 24 or 25. Errors that appear in monitored writing while disappearing under prompting are exactly the ones an accuracy mark should register.
Register and appropriateness - 11/20. This criterion exists to assess exactly what she got wrong: a greeting that belongs in a text message, and inconsistent address inside a single paragraph, in a formal letter to a newspaper.
Total: 68/100. With the permitted revision the ceiling is 78, which is a fair distance from a strong grade - the letter is competent, not finished.
3. She asks to revise. What conditions do you set, and what would you refuse to award bonus points for?
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Conditions: the revision must (1) move the thesis into the first or second paragraph, (2) hold one consistent form of address throughout, (3) rewrite the salutation and the closing formula, (4) fix the 'si' clause and the two faux amis, and (5) come in at or under 275 words. She also submits a 40-word note in French explaining two of her choices - why she chose 'vous,' and what rule governs the 'si' clause. That note is the evidence that the revision reflects learning rather than a spell-check pass.
Refusals: no bonus for simply deleting 'Salut la gang' while leaving the rest of the register untouched, since a deletion does not show she can produce the formal alternative. No bonus for shortening alone; word count is a constraint, not a skill. And no re-marking of the original: the first version stays on file as the record of independent performance, and the bonus attaches to the revision.
Finally, tell her the 10 points are not automatic. A revision that fixes the register but keeps the misplaced thesis earns part of the bonus, not all of it, and she should know the criteria before she starts writing.