Knowing the Rule and Not Using It
Kata is preparing for the language-systems part of the exam: a ten-item banked cloze with four options per gap, plus ten error-correction items, in 25 minutes. In her latest attempt she scores 5/10 on the cloze and 4/10 on error correction, and the errors cluster. She writes “I am living here since 2019”, “I look forward to hear from you”, “despite of the bad weather”, and “she gave me many useful informations”. When asked, she can recite the rules correctly: since takes the present perfect, look forward to is followed by -ing, despite takes no of, and information is uncountable. She says she “didn’t have time to check”. In the cloze she chooses by what “sounds natural” and rejects the correct option “nevertheless” because “it sounds too formal” for her. Her reading and writing scores are strong; only this paper is dragging her down.
1. Identify the single mechanism behind her errors and explain why “it sounds natural” is a failing strategy for her specifically.
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Mechanism: her declarative knowledge is intact but not proceduralised. She can state the rule when the rule is the focus of attention; under time pressure her production falls back on Hungarian-influenced defaults (durative present, “despite of”, pluralised uncountables). This is a retrieval and automatisation problem, not a knowledge gap.
Why “sounds natural” fails for her: her sense of naturalness is calibrated on Hungarian and on the English she has read, not on the register and collocations the exam tests. “Nevertheless” is formally correct and frequent in written argument; rejecting it because it “sounds too formal” is a register judgement made without a register model.
Consequence for study: more rule revision will not move her. She needs forced-choice retrieval under a short clock, with the reason spoken aloud.
2. She has ten minutes left to check. Which four things should she verify, and in what order? Justify the order by expected marks gained, not by how easy each check is.
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Order by expected yield
- Verb forms after “since / for / how long”. High frequency in the paper and she has a stable error there; almost every occurrence is a potential mark.
- Fixed expressions with a preposition or particle (look forward to + -ing, despite / in spite of, depend on). These recur and are quick to scan for.
- Countability and plurals (information, advice, research, equipment). Cheap to check, and errors are conspicuous.
- The cloze items she chose “by ear”. Re-decide only those, using the sentence’s logic words (contrast, result, addition) rather than naturalness.
Why not start with the cloze: cloze items are one mark each, but guessing again without a rule often swaps one wrong answer for another. Tense and collocation checks recover marks she is currently losing systematically.
3. Build two minimal contrast pairs she can use to retrain the two most frequent errors, and say how she should practise them.
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Pair 1 - present perfect vs present continuous
- “I have lived here since 2019.” (situation started in the past, still true; since anchors the start)
- “I am living here at the moment, while my flat is being painted.” (temporary situation, no since)
Pair 2 - despite vs although
- “Despite the bad weather, the match went ahead.” (noun phrase follows)
- “Although the weather was bad, the match went ahead.” (clause follows)
Practice method: one pair per day, five elicited sentences aloud with the reason attached (“perfect, because since”), then a 90-second timed gap-fill mixing the pair with distractors. The reason must be spoken, because her problem appears only when she stops attending to the rule.