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Showing posts with the label 0990 English Language

A Descriptive Winner

In my year-long writing course at Dreaming Spires Home Learning , we held a contest to see who wrote the best descriptive piece based on the topic of going on safari. Here is our winner's response: strong in atmosphere but lacking just that bit of consistency for top marks. "The safari truck trundles along the dirt road, the soft hum of the engine the only sign of civilisation. The dirt road that it travels is smooth and worn from many long years of use. Around the open-backed vehicle, the long, waving fronds of grass roll past like tiny waves in the wind, flowing like a stream. The jeep seems to be floating, sailing along the yellow-green sea. Trees stand out against the sky, a fishbowl of brightest blue above our heads. The sun shines down on us, and a drowsy heat sets in. The whole world, rippling like the grass below us, seems to be slowly drifting beneath the far away sky. Animals move in the distance, blurred shapes in the heat. The tall neck of a giraffe can be...

Face it - you're a Meeple

Do you know what a "meeple" is? It's a game--playing piece in the shape of a person, and coming to realise how you, an exam candidate, are like a meeple is important in your psyche for the exam, especially the CAIE English Language version. It's simple, really. Each question on the exam has a set of "rules" - the way it's asked, the way you answer, and what the mark scheme is looking for. There's a game to play here. Quite typically, the questions with longer answers will set a task along the lines of "You are the little girl" or "You are the father" or "You are the mayor" or some other kind of persona. In each case, "you" is not going to be ... well ... you. It's going to be the persona you adopt for answering the question as the game wants you to. This is particularly important in Paper 2, Question 1, where the task includes evaluating some texts. Personally, you may quite like the idea of start...

What about those Word Counts?

We're entering the heavy-duty revision season again as CAIE rolls its new 2020 version off the shelves and into the exam halls. Questions are coming thick and fast from those trying to navigate what the mark scheme means about this, what the instructions mean about that, and one of those pesky little details - that is, word counts - is causing consternation amongst my current revision students. Word counts are usually just a guide for how much the board is expecting the material to merit, though it's not unusual to go over the count for Question 2 (d), the one about language analysis (in the old style exam, this was Question 2 in the Reading Paper noted as 21, 22, or 23). None of them are extremely consequential as long as you're writing enough. The one exception is Question 1(f), the summary of Text B. The summary question (Question 3 in the old style) is definitely expecting concise expression, so if (as it is now) advising "not more than 120" words,...