Twenty-eight words and 'I have finished'
Tomás is eleven. Given a model, twenty minutes and a dictionary, he writes six or seven accurate sentences: correct 'there is/are', consistent past simple, full stops in the right places. In a timed mock he had ten minutes and this unseen prompt: 'Write a note to your friend Sam. Invite him to your birthday party. Say when and where.' He wrote: 'Dear Sam, I invite you to my birthday part. It is on Saturday. It is at my house. I like party. From.' He used twenty-eight words, stopped after six minutes, and told the teacher he had finished. Nothing follows 'From'. Three words contain heavily crossed-out letters. The class has been drilled on party vocabulary from a handout that contained the sentence 'I like party'. On the same task the class average was thirty-four words, and nine of twelve scripts had a name after the closing.
1. Rank the three problems - short length, missing message conventions, copied formula - and justify the ranking by what the task is actually asking the candidate to do.
Read the worked answer
The task asks for a message that does a job: invite, say when, say where. Tomás did all three. Content is not the failure, so a ranking that starts with 'he needs more vocabulary' is aimed at the wrong target.
- The stopping rule is the real problem. He left four of his ten minutes unused at twenty-eight words. This caps every other issue, and it is a self-monitoring problem, not a language problem - the language he needed was already in him, as his class writing shows.
- Message conventions second. No name after 'From', thin sign-off. Cheap to fix, immediately visible to a marker, and he already produces it when a model is on the desk.
- The copied sentence last for score, first for diagnosis. 'I like party' adds nothing and tells me nothing about what he can produce; it is evidence about my handout, not about him.
Note also 'part' for 'party' - a likely pronunciation-driven spelling - and the crossings, which show he does monitor, just at letter level rather than message level.
2. Design a three-week routine with timings and a success criterion for each week.
Read the worked answer
Week 1 - the finishing check (5 min per lesson). Before handing anything in: count the words, find the name at the end, read the whole note aloud. I model it, then she does it while I watch. Success: in three short tasks he adds a closing name and reaches 30+ words with no prompting.
Week 2 - message frames (8 min write, 2 min check). Four frames: invitation, thank-you, apology, arranging to meet. Each has a required slot list - who, what, when, where, from. The list stays on the desk. Success: all five slots present in 3 of 4 scripts.
Week 3 - full timing (10 min, unseen, no dictionary). Then peer check against the slot list. Success: 32+ words, named addressee and sign-off, no copied sentence, and at least eight of the ten minutes used.
The slot list is visible in weeks 1–2 and removed in week 3, so the scaffold is withdrawn rather than depended on.
3. Say what you would deliberately not correct in this script, and why, at this level.
Read the worked answer
Not corrected: the crossed-out letters (he is already editing; red ink on top of that teaches him to stop); 'part' beyond a note to the spelling pattern, since it is one phoneme-to-spelling slip, not a spelling-system failure; the repeated 'It is on Saturday / It is at my house' structure, because two short correct sentences are worth more here than one joined sentence with errors; and 'I invite you', which is understandable and appropriate, even if a native speaker would phrase it differently.
Corrected, because they are message-level: the missing name after 'From', and the decision that six minutes means finished. Both are about whether the note works as a note.
The principle: at this level I correct what stops the message doing its job, and I let developmental error sit unless it blocks meaning. Correcting everything makes the script look diligent and teaches nothing he can act on under time pressure.