The assessment procedure was very reliable: every written paper was read by two examiners and marked according to a certain criteria with grades from 1 to 20. If the grades of the two examiners were more than two points different, the paper was read by a third examiner, but if the difference was within two grades, the difference was resolved in favour of the candidate. The examiners did not know how their colleagues had assessed the paper – they could not leave any notes on it while reading it. Neither did the examiners know the authors’ names – all the papers were coded with the candidates’ identification numbers. Though the general level of almost all the participants was very high, there were typical problem areas in their written papers that are worth mentioning. They can be divided into several categories: 1. Communicative task: lack of full agreement with the task, deviations from the topic. 2. Content: dull and trivial content, no or few ideas of one’s own, incorporating elements of familiar “topics” in the essay. 3. Argumentation: demagogical appeals used instead of arguments, lack of persuasive skills. 4. Genre: inconsistency with the genre stated in the task (the resulting text was meant to be an article), for example, using appeals like “you know”, “you see” typical of a letter. 5. Register: using informal conversational style (“you will see what an awesome country Russia is”). 6. Communicative style: using an assertive tone often created by modal verbs of obligation (“you must come to Russia”, “you should know that”) which can be perceived as rude by native speakers. 7. Text links: lack of linking devices (transition words) such as moreover, furthermore, as a result, on the contrary, therefore, likewise, nevertheless, on the one hand, on the other hand, however… and replacing them with conjunctions and/but which are not supposed to be used at sentence beginnings because their function is to connect words in sentences rather than sentences in a written text. 8. Vocabulary: excessive use of lexical clichйs such as “to do one’s best”, “cannot help -ing”, “to make both ends meet”, “suffice it to say”, “it goes without saying”, “it is common knowledge that”, “to be part and parcel”, etc. which make the text sound artificial. 9. Syntax: too short (chopped) or too long and “clumsy” sentences that cause syntactic ambiguity. 10. Accuracy: typical grammar and spelling mistakes (tenses, prepositions, articles). To overcome or reduce the above difficulties, the following activities can be recommended to the students before or between the competitions: a) read a lot of authentic texts of various genres (mass media, fiction, popular science), analyse their content and the development of ideas, trace argumentation where possible, borrow their vocabulary and grammar and take a close look at their stylistic features. Try to notice the balance between popular (high-frequency) phrases and the individual way the authors express themselves; b) read a lot in Russian as well, keep yourself informed about the major social and cultural events in your home country and abroad in order to be a knowledgeable and broad-minded person who is interesting to talk to (and read); c) practice writing within the formats and requirements of the national and international examinations in English using authentic materials. The speaking task was as follows:
The list of 60 quotes was divided into several cards to reduce their repetition with different pairs of candidates, for example:
All the candidates were divided into pairs, and each pair performed in front of two examiners – an interlocutor and an assessor. The former talked to the candidates without making any notes, while the latter did not interfere with the conversation but assessed each candidate according to a list of criteria. The interlocutor had to grade the candidates holistically – giving each of them a grade for the general impression they made. After every pair of contestants, the examiners took a short break to discuss their opinions and sum up the resulting grades. Typical problem areas in speaking were as follows: 1. Content: no or few ideas of one’s own, incorporating elements of familiar “topics” in the talk. 2. Argumentation: limited ability to produce arguments which leads to repeating and paraphrasing the same idea several times. 3. Listening: lack of listening in the process of conversation so that the partner’s remarks are not taken into account. 4. Interaction: engaging in a monologue rather than a dialogue; excessive talkativeness which leads to monopolising the conversation. 5. Discourse: limited language for expressing agreement or disagreement, interrupting politely or adding information (the only expressions used were “I disagree”, “I don’t quite agree”, “I agree”); inappropriate use of discourse markers (“By the way”). 6. Fluency: lack of natural verbal behaviour, constructing utterances on the basis of silent Russian-English translation. 7. Non-verbal communication: lack of visual contact with the interlocutor. 8. Style: assertive communicative style and imposing one’s opinion which are often perceived as rude by native speakers (Don’t you know that…, Don’t you think that…). 9. Vocabulary: limited range of vocabulary which leads to inevitable lexical repetitions within a comparatively short conversation. 10. Accuracy: grammar and pronunciation mistakes or inaccuracies. To develop better speaking skills the following recommendations can be made: a) listen, analyse and imitate as many authentic English audio materials as you can find (cassettes that accompany your textbooks, radio programmes, video films, etc.) paying attention to verbal (and where possible – non-verbal) behaviour of the speakers, particularly in educational and professional contexts; b) take notice of audio scripts in your textbooks, particularly dialogues, where they often indicate the discourse markers used by the speakers such as supporting remarks made by the listener; c) audio and video record and then analyse your school and other presentations, discussions and debates. By Ludmila Gorodetskaya,
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