EXAMINATION FORMS
The units suggested here are intended to provide language work for a form preparing for a public examination. In spite of the changes that have been made in the last few years, candidates are still called upon to perform three basic operations: continuous writing (essay); summary or precis; and answering questions designed to show understanding of a piece of prose or a poem (comprehension).
Writing
This sequence of units has been chosen, first of all, to demonstrate that any successful use of language must depend upon the writer's ability to judge the audience for which he is writing. This may be approached through BI 'Formal and informal', which begins by exploring the way in which we intuitively match the formality of the language we speak to our audience. G I 'Telling the tale' allows this idea to be worked out in relation to written language, while A3 'Judging your audience' leads directly to a consideration of the examiner as an audience.
Further work may be derived from K10 'Informing the public', which looks at the problem of writing official pamphlets for large audiences, or G12 'Reviewer and audience', which considers how far a reviewer is forced to make large assumptions about his audience's previous experience of his field.
Writing a letter may be among the choices offered to a candidate. Two units afford the opportunity of writing letters for clearly defined audiences: K4 'Applying for a job' and K7 'Letters'.
E7 'Write me an essay' takes a selection of the words often used to label the writing which is asked for in school, and suggests a procedure by which the class can find out what other members of staff have in mind when they use them. This enables the relationship between writer and audience to be examined in the particular context of the pupils' day-to-day working life at school.
D6 'What do we correct?' considers the basis of corrections made by teachers, and it can be preceded, or perhaps followed, by D5 'What is a rule?', which asks what is meant by the word 'rule' as applied to language.
Summary
Examinations like 0 level often set a passage to be summarised 'in about a
third of its length', or some other arbitrary proportion. A I I 'Summarising'
may be used to introduce the idea that a given passage may be summarised at
various lengths, depending upon the reason for making a summary. A12 'Making
an abstract' is concerned with the technique of abstracting an argument from
a passage, while B6 'Bias' explores the way in which selection of material for
inclusion in a summary may lead to bias. G3 'Slanting the news' is also concerned
with this aspect of the operation.
A unit that concerns itself with summary as a feature of daily newspapers is
A6 'Reporting Parliament', while A4 'Reporting events', although it takes sport
as its theme, may be used to deal with the problems of reporting many other
kinds of event.
Comprehension
Passages set for comprehension are not always referred to the context from which they have been taken, although understanding must always depend, ultimately, upon being able to relate language to context. E4 'Half, please' explores this relationship in the medium of spoken language, B4 'Notices' in the medium of written.
The nature of the relationship set up between writer and audience, already referred to under the first heading, may be taken up again through A2 'Reading and understanding' and F7 'Weather forecasting'. The task of writing as precisely and unambiguously as possible may be explored through Al 'Words and actions', and G7 'Writing the rules'.
Difficulties that confront a reader faced with an unfamiliar piece of language may be explored by means of a sequence taken from theme D: D I O 'What is difficult?', D 11 'Meaning', and D 12 'Ambiguity and ambivalence', followed possibly by E5 'Abstract, general, and particular'. This unit, which looks at the difference between abstraction and generalisation, leads on to G6 'Catch phrases', which examines the way in which abstractions come to serve as labels, or slogans, for complex events.
More detailed work on language may be undertaken through a further sequence from theme D, such as D2 'Order in sentences' and D3 'Words in sentences', which are concerned with the way in which words are put together in a sentence. D4 'Pattern in language' may then be used to extend this exploration of the way in which language works.