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October 05, 2024, 12:02:15 am

Author Topic: How are we going to get marked for the written Chinese sections of our EA exam?  (Read 4106 times)

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VWVolks

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Hey all,

tl;dr Are we able to write Pinyin for our Chinese externals and be marked for it?

As many of you know, we will not be allowed dictionaries for our Chinese EA (for that matter, any language subjet) this year.

Now, obviously, having Chinese as a second language makes it difficult for us to write in full-blown Chinese to express PingPing has an optimistic tone which is shown when she uses the word xyz, thus, she has a positive attitude towards abc.

Some of you will say, "oh, that's fine, just write it in Pinyin," however, there is no confirmation that Pinyin is actually an acceptable form of response to QCAA markers. I asked my teacher about this and she shrugged and simply said, "I don't know." Classic QCAA style. The scenario will be this (I'd imagine):

  • Teacher reads the Pinyin and deducts marks for communication
  • Teacher skips over the Pinyin and assumes that it is a blank box

However, after meticulously examining the ISMG for IA2, to get the top band of marks it says you need to respond, "in proficient and complex Chinese." That is fairly self-explanatory, right? Even though it says nothing about how many and what type of mistakes we can make nor does it say whether we can use pinyin or not.

But.

This is one of the bullet points but what about the other two? The other two merely says that you need to be able to provide a response, so does that mean you can make errors and still get top bands for those bullet points? So does that mean... you can use pinyin and not impede the overall meaning of what you're writing? In all honestly, I don't ******* know.

Unlike most other modern languages (hi latin) offered at school, you can't just sound Chinese. Like seriously, you can even sound Japanese but NOT Chinese. The only way you can do that is through Pinyin, but if that's taken away from us, how is that fair??? One character difference in Chinese could virtually change the entire meaning of phrases or even entire sentences.

Now, I've been drilling adjectives/nouns to describe tone, attitude and purpose for the past few weeks, as well as your typical complex sentence structures. So I reckon you will be fine as long as you spend 2 excruciating hours every night religiously drilling Chinese words. But seriously, not everyone is going to do that and it isn't a good allocation of time.

So what do you guys think? Have you heard from your teachers as to whether you can use pinyin and be marked for it?
« Last Edit: August 30, 2020, 09:54:02 am by VWVolks »
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