Real words, wrong answers: marking word formation
Pani Ewa is marking the word-formation task from her class's mock rozszerzona paper. Each gap takes one word derived from the prompt in capitals, correctly spelt, which fits the gap grammatically and in meaning. Three answers worry her:
- 'The instructions were so ___ (PREDICT) that nobody knew what to do.' - the student wrote UNPREDICTED.
- 'The professor's lecture was ___ (EXCEPT) good, far better than usual.' - the student wrote EXCEPTIONABLE.
- 'The committee praised the ___ (CONSIDER) amount of work involved.' - the student wrote CONSIDERATE.
All three are real English words, correctly spelt, and all three are wrong. Two students have asked for the marks anyway: 'The word exists and the grammar is right - what else is there?' Pani Ewa wants a one-sentence rationale for each item that she can reuse when the papers are handed back, plus an answer to the fairness objection.
1. For each of the three items, show why the word exists but still fails.
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Each item is decided by two tests applied after the word has been derived: does it fit the grammatical slot, and does it carry the meaning the sentence requires?
- PREDICT → unpredictable. The slot after 'so', before 'that', needs an adjective describing the instructions as impossible to foresee. Unpredicted exists but means 'not foretold' - it describes an event nobody predicted (an unpredicted result), not a quality of a text. It also breaks the causal link: instructions do not confuse people because they were not predicted. Unpredictable supplies both slot and sense.
- EXCEPT → exceptionally. The word must sit before the adjective 'good' and modify it, so it must be an adverb. Exceptionable is an adjective meaning 'open to objection' and cannot modify 'good' at all. Exceptional would be grammatical only in another slot (an exceptional lecture; the lecture was exceptional) and would also invert the sense, since 'far better than usual' is positive.
- CONSIDER → considerable. 'The ___ amount of work' requires an adjective meaning 'large'. Considerate means 'thoughtful of other people' and collocates with people and behaviour, not with amounts.
The pattern: the base word supplies a family of candidates, and only the sentence chooses among them.
2. Draft Pani Ewa's reply to 'the word exists and the grammar is right - what else is there?'.
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Three-sentence reply:
'The instruction is not "invent a word from the one in capitals" but "complete the sentence", which means the finished sentence must be grammatical and mean something a competent user would say. "The committee praised the considerate amount of work" is not English, even though its parts are: a word that exists in the dictionary can still be the wrong word here, and choosing correctly is exactly what the item tests. The base word only fixes the family - PREDICT allows predictable, unpredictable, prediction, predictor - so a correct derivation is the beginning of the answer, not the end of it.'
The principle to state once and repeat: one word, correct spelling, grammatical fit, meaningful sentence. Four conditions, not two.
3. A third student wrote UNPREDICTIBLE and CONSIDERIBLE, arguing that these are 'just spelling slips' and the words are recognisable. Rule on this.
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Score them zero, and say so plainly.
In this task type the written form is the object being tested: the candidate is asked to produce the derived word, so a form that does not exist in English has not been produced, however close it looks. 'Unpredictible' is not a variant of unpredictable, it is a non-word, and a reader meeting it in a text would take it as an error rather than an alternative spelling. The same applies to 'considerible'.
The distinction worth explaining to a protesting class: a slip that produces a different real word (considerate for considerable) is a meaning error, while a slip that produces no word at all (considerible) is a form error - but both fail the same condition, 'correctly spelt and existing'. Spelling is not decoration layered on top of vocabulary; it is how the word is identified. Practical advice: in the last minute of the section, check which suffix each family uses (-able, -ible, -ance, -ence) before handing the paper in.