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The VCAA Chief Assessor for VCE EAL, Glynis Rose, and Assistant Chief Assessors, Rosemary McLoughlin, Jenna Gomes and Michael E Daniel, presented an overview of the 2021 VCE EAL exam. Glynis and Rosemary detailed what the assessors are looking for in each section of the exam and provided suggestions for how we can best prepare our students.
Rosemary emphasised the importance of teachers providing regular opportunities for students to develop their listening skills throughout the year. She suggested encouraging students to listen independently to spoken texts, such as podcasts, in an area of their interest. Rosemary detailed common errors in weaker responses in the listening component of the exam. These include lack of accuracy and specificity due to limited language skills and misunderstanding of questions. It is essential to practice approaching the different question formats encountered in Section A and to ensure students develop an understanding of paralinguistic features and language to describe delivery and tone. Jenna outlined a number of useful classroom strategies for preparing students for this section of the exam, including using the listening material from previous exams to unpack questions and listening to the texts multiple times in class to ensure students understand how to listen more effectively.
Glynis outlined the features of strong responses in Section B including a depth of understanding of the task requirements and the text, insightful analysis and use of relevant evidence from the text. She shared an example of an introduction that demonstrated a strong understanding of the key words in the topic and clearly set up the structure of the essay. She highlighted the importance of providing students with opportunities to improve their clarity of writing through grammar skills development and dictionary use. It is also critical to select accessible texts appropriate for your students with clear themes for exploration. Glynis outlined a number of classroom strategies to support the teaching of this section of the exam and emphasised the importance of understanding different types of questions.
In Section C, Glynis and Michael noted that strong responses demonstrated an understanding of the audience and context of the text, integrated analysis of argument and language and explored the implications of specific language choices. Higher scoring responses were also able to accurately identify connections between the visual and the text. Weaker responses tended to summarise rather than analyse and gave generalised descriptions of persuasive techniques. As with Section A, Glynis and Michael reinforced the necessity of building students’ skills in argument analysis gradually throughout the year, such as identifying key words, developing strategies for reading the text and an understanding of the intended effect of language. Michael also outlined a colour-coding technique for assisting students in identifying and tracking the elements of a persuasive text.
This highly informative session enabled participants to gain a deeper understanding of the requirements of the VCE EAL exam. Previous examination reports can be found here on the VCAA website and the 2021 report has just been published.
