August 23, 2024 by Doug McCurry from BooBook Education
The Difficulty of Section B Tasks
The situation with Section B of the VCE English exam is particularly uncertain, but then given the secretiveness of the VCAA there is also a good deal that is uncertain about the marking of Sections A and C. It will be most unsatisfactory if the account of Section B in the Examination Report for this year is as anodyne and opaque as is typical of VCE English exam reports.
The possibilities of Section B are very exciting, and I have found some of the student responses I have read recently to be exciting, although some of them have been rather disappointing.
See my blog on Section B on the BBE website if you want to know why I find the task itself exciting. It was certainly much more interesting reading all these Section B responses than Sections A or C.
Types of responses: personal narrative, fictional narrative, propositional discussion
The most exciting thing about this section is the possibilities for personal narrative writing.
The big issues about personal narratives are for students to keep them restrained and measured (not overwritten and melodramatic) and whether markers (or the marking leadership) can see the strength of quite simple and direct personal writing. Such writing is what I would encourage students to produce, and the question is whether markers will see the quality of such pieces. My experience says they will.
One of the most surprising things about the Section B student responses I have read is that hardly any have written propositional discussions. Considering they had presumably discussed the Framework in detail it is surprising that so few choose to write conceptual discussions or arguments about the Frameworks. Such discussion are not as good a bet as personal narrative in my view, but they are a much better bet than writing fictional narrative.
Different tasks
The characteristics of the scripts I marked recently were perhaps shaped by the particular task that follow. It is worth asking to what extent the set tasks shaped what the students wrote and whether the tasks are comparable in difficulty.
For Journeys Title: 'The path' Stimulus 1 'Sometimes the road less travelled is less travelled for a reason.' Stimulus 2 People climbing rocks. A girl seems to offer a hand up to a boy. Stimulus 3 'A journey is a process of change. It changes us, We change others, Others change us. We return home As different people.' | For Country Title: 'Going home' Stimulus 1 'lf you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are.' Stimulus 2 Image of a small shack on a barren plain with hills behind Stimulus 3 'A country is more than land; It's a web of belief systems, A tapestry of cultures, A multitude of histories. ln the end, it's People.' |
The title of 'The path' for Journeys seems very broad. Anything and everything can in a sense be seen as a path. It is a basic metaphor for life.
What path am I on?
What path would I like to be on?
The first stimulus about the road being less travelled for a reason is cognate with the title 'The Path'. Not surprisingly the students did not seem aware of the book The Road Less Travelled or the poem the Road Not Taken. The students did not seem to see the possibility that taking the road less travelled could be a good thing as is the case in the book and the poem. The statement is hard to construe without the notion of a choice being the issue. Few wrote on it, possibly because they weren't sure what it signified.
The statement is a retort to those preferring the road less travelled, by implying that the road is less travelled because of a problem or disadvantage. Both Scott Peck in his discussion and Frost in his poem are suggesting the opposite. Understanding the 'intertextuality' of this statement would open up the following questions.
Why might one choose the road that is more or less travelled?
What is the advantage and disadvantage of each?
Which kind of road have you or will you choose?
Do you want to go on the usual or popular way?
Are you prepared to go the less popular way even if it has disadvantages?
Are you prepared to take the less secure, the more adventurous and perhaps even dangerous path?
These are very good issues to write about but almost none of the students could see that they are implicit in a rather tricky statement. A pity its significance was not clear to most students. It would have been the best stimulus of the set to respond to.
You could make a narrative or relate an experience on the basis of the rock-climbing image, but there is no intellectual challenge to contend with in that image.
The third stimulus was the most popular because it could be taken as some quite simple propositions.
In what sense is a journey a process of change?
When? How? Why?
Us and others can change?
How do we return different?
Most of the responses to this stimulus were about no more than change as a result of a journey.
The challenge for students: what writing am I best at?
The challenge of preparing for this section is in the students finding out what kind of writing they do best, and how they can produce the best piece of writing they can in exam conditions.
I have views based on a lot of experience about how students (and adults) write best and with least risk in test conditions. You can read my views if you are interested, in the BBE study guide on writing for the VCE and the GAT, and the GAT writing preparation guide.
What do most students do best?
In summary my view is that students write best (and with least risk) in test conditions when they write personal narrative. By personal narrative I mean writing about a more or less actual experiences of the writer. Such writing avoids the dangers of discursive and argumentative writing in that it does not have to be well-informed and have a strong argument. If the experience is real, told honestly and thoughtfully, it can be stronger than the other kinds of writing a student may produce.
It is very hard to write a fictional narrative in test conditions and fiction can easily turn out to be sensational, melodramatic or sentimental. Some of the stronger pieces I marked were comparatively simple and direct thoughts about the writer's experiences.
Students should be aware of the dangers of empty drama, melodrama and sentimentality. They should also be discouraged from writing exaggerated and over-written description. Heightened description can easily seem exaggerated and bogus.
While personal narratives are likely to be strong, students should not be afraid of writing a discussion of an idea in the stimulus, because it is easier to show in such a discussion that they can think but harder to do so in a personal narrative and even harder in a fictional narrative.
The title for the Country Framework of 'Going home' is very straightforward, and easier than the Journeys title. An easy link can be made with the title and the third piece. Going home is about more than, and perhaps something other than, the country or land. It is the people.
This was, understandably, the most common approach taken in the responses to this topic. The pieces were mostly about home and family. It is a rather obvious approach.
The first stimulus in this set is a strange statement that does not really make sense, and in my view it should be contradicted. There are plenty of times when you don't know where you are, but that does not mean you don't know who you.
I was once lost on the outskirts of Moscow (Russia) and didn't know where I was in anything more than the most general terms but that certainly did not mean I did not know who I was. I was acutely aware of the fact that I was not Russian.
The statement might intend something about the idea that who you are is related to where you are.
This is an intelligible idea in most cases although not always the case. (But that is not what the statement literally means.) I can't remember any piece dealing with this statement, which is a wise decision by the students, although an argument that says this is not the case could be very unusual and strong.
While the first stimulus in a Section B set should offer an option for a discussion and argument, in this case it is a definite dud. Almost no student wrote discursively about the issues of identity and country in response to the first stimulus.
The were plenty of discursive possibilities in the third option but almost no one took them up as such.
What is the relationship between a country and the land?
To what extent is a country the land?
To what extent is the country the culture and history?
To what extent is a people a culture a history and a land?
No one took up and discussed these possibilities.
A discussion of ideas can be one of the simplest ways of dealing with this task.
Here is a proposition for discussion that can be formed from the third stimulus.
A country is the beliefs, culture and histories of it's people rather than a place or a land.
Discuss
(Think of Indigenous Australians but also of Jews and Palestinians.)
Most of the pieces were celebrations of places and people written in response to the third stimulus.
This is my place and my people.
This is my people and my place.
In general, this is a good enough response.
Your personal story or a personal narrative is the easiest and safest way of dealing with this task.
The possible danger of this approach is that it can be very strong for the writer, but it can seem a bit obvious to the reader. Saying I love my grandparents and where they live can seem a bit obvious. You have to the careful with it and write something distinctive about the situation. See the mentor text by Amy Duong for a very good example of this kind of writing that has real impact.
The way some students tried to get around the obviousness of what they had to say was to try to present experiences (arriving at my grandparent's place) with a good deal of descriptive detail. Descriptive detail can make an obvious situation feel strong, but it can also seem overwritten and fake. It is hard to write good big description without straining.
Quite a few pieces seemed to begin with a sensuous description that looked like a formula. Students do not want to look like you are using a formula, and they don't want to look like they are writing formula description. Less can be more in description. Overwritten description can get into all sorts of problems. Big descriptions must be done cautiously.
It is good that there was not much fiction in the responses to this task because good fiction is hard to write, especially in test conditions. There are dangers in writing about things students really do not know about. That they do not know about such topics can be obvious and a weakness.
There were some good pieces that imagined a realistic future for the writer, and this seemed to work quite well. It is a topic that mattered to the writers, and they could be ground their thoughts in actual possibilities.
The Country task seems significantly easier to me than the Journeys task. This is a worry for the exam writers and the students.
Before I read these exam scripts, I had been inclining to the view that I would prepare students for two Frameworks from which to choose when they saw the set tasks. I now think I would definitely do this because the Framework statements are easy to deal with, and the relationship between the statements and the set task is uncertain and may be quite indirect. The issue in the exam is the set title and the stimulus rather than the Framework.
It seems that the mentor texts do not have any direct meaning in doing a particular task, and I would use the most useful mentor texts for any Framework with students. I would certainly do the Amy Duong text whatever Frameworks I was doing.
I found the student responses to this task were worthwhile texts and the area of study was shown to be a particularly valuable opportunity for students and teachers.
