November 29, 2024 by Doug McCurry from BooBook Education

The Problems of Personal Narrative: for Both Writer and Reader

In a previous blog based on my experience over many years of scoring writing tests, I argued that personal narrative was the best approach for most students if they have a choice about what they will do in a writing test. This advice applies to Section B of the English exam.

Reading the Section B responses from a range of schools for the BBE Assessment Services, has confirmed my view of the problems involved in scoring these responses, but it has also qualified and modified my advice about dealing with Section B because of the approaches taken and propensities shown in the student responses I marked.

As I am under no obligation to the VCAA, I am able to comment on student work and the challenge of assessing it that VCAA markers cannot, and that VCAA exam reports do not comment about.

There were very good examples in the scripts I marked of student writing from personal experiences that enabled and fortified the responses. But the unqualified advice to students to write about something you care about is not always enabling. The genuine enthusiasm of a writer might not be communicated and shared with a reader, and the piece of writing may be limited and pedestrian to a reader without the writer’s personal enthusiasm. While I still want to draw attention to the power of personal narrative, I also want to offer some qualifications and reservations to my initial comments.

It is important to recognise (and celebrate) the freedom offered to students in the new Section B. The new section is a significant expansion of the VCE course because all of the Frameworks can be treated from a personal point of view and with a personal slant in a way that is not appropriate for the other sections of the English exam.

Although each of the Frameworks can be discussed as personal experiences or views, doing so does not guarantee an optimal performance. Descriptions of how I won the grand final or the significance of visiting my grandparents may be very limited responses. What was meaningful for a writer is not necessarily meaningful for a reader.

Good writing give a reader a kind of experience of course, but deliberate attempts to communicate experiences can seem forced and inauthentic. They can result in the kind of things that some students think they should write for English teachers. In such pieces one doubts whether the student writers are really as aware as they claim to be when they kick the winning goal, or as sensitive as they claim to be when witnessing a sunrise or sunset.

Thinking and writing

I suppose what I have to add to my advice about the power of personal narrative is that the story has to be a way of thinking about the writer’s experiences and the world as they experience it. They should be aiming to show a VCAA marker that they can think and write, and for some student this is easier to do when they write a more generalised thematic essay.

It is hard to exaggerate the vague and vapid generality of the writing for the old thematic Section B, and the new task is an unmitigated delight in comparison. But it seems that some students would be better off writing a conceptual or discursive piece (and in that sense take a thematic approach) than writing about personal experiences. Writing in the first person about personal experiences is not necessarily an optimal approach to writing in test conditions. An optimal approach is going to show that a student can both write and think, and it may be easier for a student in exam conditions to show that they can think in a discursive essay than in a personal or fictional narrative.

One of the things I have seen in reading Section B responses is the comparatively few analytical or discursive response presented, and the limited significance of the Frameworks and the mentor texts in the exam responses. Very few students make any comments on the Frameworks as such, and there are very few references to or signs of the mentor texts influencing exam responses. The limited significance of the Frameworks and the mentor texts can be recognised and accepted by teachers and students.

There is no need for either Frameworks or mentor texts to have a writing area of study or writing section in the exam. I have heard the cynical view that the Frameworks are to give teachers something to teach, and the mentor texts are to mitigate the charge that the end of the book-based Section B is ‘English lite’. If teachers can see the Framework and mentor texts as nugatory they can run dead on them, although students cannot ignore them in writing exam responses. They cannot interpret titles and stimulus outside the scope of Framework (as some do), but it the stimulus and the title (interpreted with the scope of the Framework) that they focus on in the exam.

The insignificance of this Frameworks and mentor texts to the exam task was demonstrated by individual students writing about Frameworks they had not studied. There were cohorts in which 95% wrote about one Framework (presumably the one taught) and 5% chose to write about another because they preferred it or could see a good way of responding to the set task.

It looked as though this option was recognised if not encouraged in some schools. Clearly students and teachers have to work whether it is a good strategy to decide on which Framework to deal with depending on the set task.

I have written in an earlier blog that I think I would do two Frameworks with my students, but I now think I would consider doing the four in some sense. And I would certainly consider with my students the option of them choosing the Framework they would write about when they see the set tasks. (I will write about the tasks set for 2024 in the future.)

The assessment challenges of Section B

In one sense the student responses to this task were very diverse for an English exam, and some markers will be uncomfortable with this diversity. Relevance to the set task is the fundamental reference point for some VCAA markers, and this is a very difficult issue for this task. The extent to which responses are preprepared, learned and/or plagiarised rather than written in response to a set title and a stimulus is a difficult issue.

The design of the Section B exam task is unusual. As the title for a piece of writing is set and one of three pieces of stimulus has to be used in a response, this places great pressure on the actual terms of the question. A student (and their teacher) might see little of what they had done during the year (and hoped for in the exam) reflected in the set task. Hence it may be best for students to be prepared to respond to any Framework depending on the set task. There is a lot of room for dissatisfaction with the set tasks, and this puts a lot of pressure on the task setters.

But there are other uncertainties for students and markers. The biggest uncertainty is the status of the title and the stimulus.

• To what extent and how should the piece reflect the title and the stimulus?
• How tight is the relationship expected to be?
• Can there be no direct reference to the title and the stimulus in the piece?
• Is the title of the stimulus the more important reference point for a response?
• Is a direct and clear relationship to the title and the stimulus a definite virtue?
• Can a reference to the title or stimulus be judged to be no more than weak and nominal?
• Does a weak or gestural reference to the title and the stimulus lead to a (declared or tacit) downgrading penalty?
• Need the constraint of title and stimulus be explicitly recognised?
• Should a response be written directly to the title and a stimulus?

Given these uncertainties, I think students should hope to be able to use some of the ideas they have thought about during the year in the exam, but they must expect to develop a piece of writing with a clear relationship to a piece of stimulus and the nominated title.

And what about the relationship of the title and stimulus to the Framework? It is possible to respond to the title and stimulus in a way that has very little to do with the Framework, this will certainly be penalised.

There are going to be a lot of problems in the assessment of Section B this year, and possibly in years to come. One wonders what the third and fourth marking rates will be for Section B scripts this year.

An Exam report to look forward to

One hopes there will be discussion of the difficulties of assessing this task in the exam report. One hopes that the exam report will be more frank and detailed about what is done and how, than they have been in recent years. It will be most unsatisfactory if the current uncertainties about the marking of Section B are not clarified for the future. It is unsatisfactory that students (and teachers) have to deal with the exam this year without clarification or direction about obvious uncertainties of the assessment from the VCAA.

In one sense my initial advice stands. One of the things students should be exploring in AoS 2 of Unit 3 is what how they will write best in exam conditions.

Is a personal narrative the best way for an individual to show that they can think and write?

Or is some kind of discursive, expository or argumentative approach the best way for an individual student to show that they can think and write?