A formal email to a Taupulega
Talia is in Year 11 at a Wellington school and is building her drafting portfolio for the writing standard. Her task is to email the Taupulega of her grandparents' atoll to ask whether a Wellington youth group of 18 people can use the fale for a two-hour welcome during a visit in July. Her 180-word draft opens 'Hi guys', explains the trip in two sentences, uses the English words 'booking' and 'venue' because she does not know the Tokelauan ones, gives the date as '7/8', and ends with 'see you'. Talia speaks Tokelauan at home with her grandmother and writes confidently in English. Her teacher, Mr Aleni, is a fluent speaker from Nukunonu. Feedback is due in two days, and the class of 12 has one more week of drafting before the work is assessed. Mr Aleni has 50 minutes of class time and one 15-minute slot to conference with individual students. He is unsure whether to correct forms that come from Talia's home variety and whether to let her keep the English words.
1. Rank Mr Aleni's feedback priorities for Talia's draft and justify the order.
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Ranked by cost to the text's purpose:
- Audience and vā. 'Hi guys' addressed to a Taupulega fails before the reader reaches the request. This is the highest-priority correction because it damages the purpose of the whole text.
- Development of the request. The reader needs: who is asking, what is wanted, when, how many people, what the group will do while there, and how the group will look after the fale. Two sentences does not give the Taupulega enough to decide, and the standard rewards development of ideas.
- The date. '7/8' is genuinely ambiguous (7 August or 8 July) and the visit is in July. Writing 'te 8 o Iulai', or spelling it out in English, removes a real risk of the group arriving on the wrong day.
- Lexical gaps. 'Booking' and 'venue' need Tokelauan equivalents - teach three or four high-value words, not twenty.
- Surface accuracy. Spelling and punctuation last.
Correcting every spelling slip first would bury the one problem that actually stops the email working. Also, Mr Aleni should source openings and closings from real community correspondence, or ask the Taupulega's secretary for an example, rather than inventing a formula - that also gives Talia a model she can trust.
2. What should Mr Aleni do about the English words and about Talia's home-variety forms?
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These are two separate decisions.
- English words: code-switching is a normal drafting strategy for a bilingual writer, but it is not acceptable in a final text to a Taupulega when Tokelauan equivalents exist and can be taught in minutes. Supply the equivalents, show them in a sentence, and let Talia choose and check.
- Home-variety forms: do not mark them as errors. Talia's variety is legitimate Tokelauan, and the standard asks whether she can craft text for a purpose and audience - not whether she reproduces one atoll's usage. Where her forms differ from Mr Aleni's Nukunonu usage, he should say so explicitly ('that is your grandmother's way, it is not wrong'), and only change it if consistency within the one text matters.
Marking a student's family Tokelauan as wrong teaches her that school Tokelauan is the only real version, which is both inaccurate and likely to silence her in class. The line to draw is between variation (leave it) and fitness for this audience (fix it).
3. How should Mr Aleni use 50 minutes of class time and one 15-minute conference to move all 12 drafts forward?
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Design the class time around the criteria, and spend the conference where it changes the most.
- 15 min - models: display two real formal openings and two closings drawn from community sources. The class names what each one does (greets, identifies the writer, makes the request, thanks, closes).
- 15 min - weak model: students mark a deliberately poor email against three criteria (audience, information, closing). This makes the criteria visible without exposing a classmate's draft.
- 15 min - pair check: pairs apply the same three criteria to each other's drafts. Most of the class fixes register and missing information here, without Mr Aleni.
- 5 min - set the revision task: rewrite the opening, add the three missing details, rewrite the closing.
- Conference: give the 15 minutes to Talia and one other student with a structural problem. Talia has three issues (register, date, lexis) that a conversation resolves faster than written comments, and a 15-minute slot spent on spelling in the strongest draft is a poor use of the only individual time available.