1. Section B, No.5. I think the candidates can give the correct answer, because no any replying letters after she sent 20 letters to apply a job;
2. Section B, No.7. You may be right, but as a AS students, I offen remind of them that a Chinese character will be changed to other mearning if you add or change the redical in most situations. They must know it. My students also realised other cases: changing the order, e.g. qiupai & paiqiu, lingdai & dailing, shigu & gushi, huabai & baihua......(Sorry cannot type characters here).
3. Regarding the 'hope' -xiwang and 'disapointment'-shiwang. Yes, every year Edexcel made mistake. However, my students are used to this mistake because I highlighted this for them already when they practised the previous papers. So two weeks ago when they leaving school, I said to them it will be strange if this year Edexcel wrote the correct one.
X. Pan
Mandarin Chinese Teacher
Oxford High School
________________________________
From: Mandarin Chinese Teaching on behalf of MTATE
Sent: Tue 2012-5-29 10:33
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: AS paper contentious areas
Anyone out there checked through the AS paper from yesterday yet?
Have you spotted the three areas of contention? Can you let me know if you think I am going mad or not, please.....
1. Section B: Reading, No 5, question (b) Why does Chen Ling believe that it is not easy to find a job ? Text for Chen Ling reads: ??????????,????????,????????
From this are they expecting an answer something like, 'companies don't write back.'??
Since the text doesn't actually give a clear reason, I don't know that my students will have got this. It doesn't say that the letters were written to companies, although students should have enough about them to realise this.
Anyone have any opinions about this?
2. Section B: Reading, No 7, question (ii) (f) Why does he (Gaz) think people in Taiwan are very creative? The answer can be found in the text that reads: ???????,?????????????,?????????????,???,??????
I'm sure some of you will say, it's obvious and they can work it out if they recognise ?????, ?? and ???. But what about ??, doesn't that come up in the environment topic, which is taught at A2? My students will definately not have seen ? before and may have confused it as ? in the stress of the exam. I'm not sure that my students have ever learnt ? either, although you may argue that they could have learnt it as pencil case.
Not sure about this, would welcome some input.
3. An Erratum message was sent by Edexcel about ? on p26 of the paper, attached to ?? being written incorrectly. We were asked to inform the students. What they didn't say was that the same error appeared on p28 as bullet point 2 in the essay writing criteria. Here it is attached to ??. I haven't spoken to my students, and dearly hope that they weren't thrown by this and took on board the earlier error referring to the same character. But what if they didn't? Shouldn't this have been pointed out as an Erratum too?
I would welcome any comments on what I have mentioned here, as every single point on this paper could make the difference between grades. I think the paper was much more catered towards students who have learnt Chinese from scratch, and they should be able to achieve well on it, but why are little things thrown in to confuse them? What do you think? Please let me know.
Thanks in advance for your input.
Michelle
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Michelle Tate
Head of Chinese
Katharine Lady Berkeley's School
Wotton-under-Edge
Glos. GL12 8RB
Tel: 01453-842227
Email: [log in to unmask]
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