Register and Address Form in a Reading Passage About a School Exchange
Independent written-script classroom exercise. Any times, word targets and marking priorities below are hypothetical task instructions, not the official Finnish examination. No audio is supplied. A reading passage is a letter from a Russian host school to an Australian partner school. It opens: «Уважаемые коллеги! Пишем вам по поводу обмена, который планируется на весну.» Mid-text it shifts: «Мы хотели бы уточнить, сколько учеников приедет, и просим сообщить об этом до конца января.» It closes: «С уважением, администрация школы № 5.» A question asks about the tone and one asks what action the reader must take. A second distractor claims the letter is informal because it uses «вы» rather than «Вы» in one place, and a third claims the deadline is 'by the end of the month' without specifying which month. The passage contains no first-person singular forms and no diminutives.
1. How should the reader classify the register, and which textual features support that classification?
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Register: formal, institutional, written.
Features supporting it:
- Opening vocative «Уважаемые коллеги!» - the standard formal salutation to a group of peers, not to friends.
- «хотели бы» - the conditional-softened wish form typical of official correspondence; it is politer and more formal than «хотим».
- «просим сообщить» - performative request verb in the institutional first-person plural.
- Closing «С уважением» - the fixed formal sign-off.
- Absence of diminutives, slang, or first-person singular «я» - consistent with an institutional voice.
On the «вы/Вы» distractor: capitalisation of «Вы» is a courtesy convention, and its occasional lowercase form in running text does not make a letter informal. Register is carried by the whole cluster of features, not by one capital letter. The candidate should reject that distractor on principle.
2. What is the required action and deadline, and how should the reader avoid the 'end of the month' trap?
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Required action: the partner school must report the number of students coming.
Deadline: до конца января - by the end of January.
The trap: 'end of the month' is a paraphrase that drops the named month. The source names January explicitly, so the paraphrase is under-specified and should be rejected. A careful reader anchors the deadline to the named month and, if writing an answer, reproduces it: 'by the end of January'.
Reasoning to show in an answer:
- Identify the verb of obligation: «просим сообщить».
- Identify its object: «сколько учеников приедет».
- Identify the temporal limit: «до конца января».
- Check the paraphrase against all three; a paraphrase that loses (3)'s specificity fails.