The Transformation That Changed the Meaning
A 20-item transformation exercise is set from the prescribed prose lesson. Each item is worth 1 mark. The items include: 'He was so tired that he could not climb the stairs' → too...to; 'She said, I will come tomorrow' → reported speech; and 'The news surprised me' → passive. In 33 scripts, 19 lose the too...to mark, 12 lose the reported-speech mark, and 7 lose the passive mark. Typical wrong answers are 'He was too tired that he could not climb the stairs', 'She said that she will come tomorrow', and 'I surprised the news'. The teacher has two periods before the test and must decide which transformation to reteach first. The school's marking policy gives no half marks and requires that corrected answers be accompanied by a one-line rule.
1. Rank the three transformations for reteaching and justify the order using error counts and rule leverage.
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Teach too...to first. It has the highest error count (19/33) and a single structural rule that also repairs confusion with so...that: too + adjective + to + infinitive; the infinitive carries the negative idea, so no that...not clause is needed. Reported speech comes second: 12 errors, and the two changes are backshift (will → would) and time-word shift (tomorrow → the next day). Passive comes third: 7 errors, and the scripts show that most students can form the passive; the error is a word-order slip, not a missing concept. Ranking by raw count alone would be crude, but here the highest-count item also has the broadest transfer: the same too...to pattern appears in prose paraphrase and in the writing section. The passive gets a five-minute board correction, not a full reteach.
2. Correct the three typical wrong answers and supply the one-line rule required by the marking policy.
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- Wrong: 'He was too tired that he could not climb the stairs.' Correct: 'He was too tired to climb the stairs.' Rule: too + adjective + to-infinitive; the negative meaning is inside the infinitive.
- Wrong: 'She said that she will come tomorrow.' Correct: 'She said that she would come the next day.' Rule: after a past reporting verb, will becomes would and tomorrow becomes the next day (or the following day).
- Wrong: 'I surprised the news.' Correct: 'I was surprised by the news.' Rule: in the passive, the person who receives the feeling becomes the subject; surprise takes a person as object in the active. The first correction is not just a word swap: the student has mixed two patterns, so the rule must name both parts. The second needs two shifts; giving only would still leaves tomorrow wrong in a strict mark scheme. The third needs by, not with.
3. Design a four-item exit ticket and state the success criterion.
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Exit ticket:
- Rewrite using too...to: 'The bag was so heavy that she could not lift it.'
- Rewrite in reported speech: 'He said, I can finish it today.'
- Rewrite in the passive: 'The result disappointed us.'
- Correct or improve: 'The poem is too difficult that I cannot understand it.' Success criterion: 3 of 4 correct, and every corrected answer has a one-line rule. Item 1 checks the target pattern; item 2 checks double shift (can → could, today → that day); item 3 checks whether the student can promote the receiver of the feeling; item 4 is a discrimination item that catches overgeneralisation of so...that. Do not count a correct answer without a rule as full success, because the policy requires the rule and the rule is what transfers to new items.