[English] Reframing the English study design?

[mccurryj at netspace.net.au]

Presenters at VATE’s Meet the Assessor’s evening offered valuable insights into 
the ways that students responded to the 2010 English exam and included  
practical advice about how we teachers might understand the various tasks and 
support our students as they learn how to do them effectively with an eye on 
performing well in the end of year exam. 

However, I was a bit surprised that some of the advice was s so definitive 
about the form a language analysis response should take. 
 
For instance, apart from comments about what should appear in the first 
paragraph, it was suggested, I think, that students should be advised not to 
write at length on visual components within a text and that three paragraphs 
were certainly too many. Perhaps this was clearly the case in relation to the 
2010 Section C material and the range of student responses that were seen by 
assessors. However, I wonder if it was the case for the 2008 exam where the 
cartoon showing the asinine parent had quite a bit going on in it, much of 
which picked up points made in the verbal text. And will it be the case for the 
particular visual elements of the text chosen by the Exam setting panel for 
2011? And, anyway, how long is a paragraph? 
 
Taking into account what I think I heard, along with the way the 2010 
Examiner’s report distinguishes between the ‘visual’ and ‘the passage’, I 
wonder if there is a danger that assessors are reframing the intention of the 
study design in relation to visual language. I had assumed that students need 
to be attentive to the details of design apparent in both visual and verbal 
text and that accounting for the persuasive intention of these design choices, 
shaped as they are by the context of the text, was what was at issue in the 
task.

Janny McCurry
 



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