Language Analysis Questions

[costargh]

The "drawings" (a rather crude word for it, even the bludgey ESL students know that it's a flow chart!) to which you refer is a valid literary device to convey ideas, or rather, the development and progression of ideas.

Its simplicity makes it ideal for those foreign to the language of English who would invariably find sentence structure difficult. Flow charts cut out sentence structure while preserving a neat flow of ideas. Thus, it is obvious that this exercise examines more closely the students' reading comprehension skills, rather than their literary prose which is examined in the preceding section's essay and the following essay of that section to which you are referring. It is taken as read (pardon the pun) that any students sitting the mainstream English exam have adequate reading comprehension skills. This cannot be assumed for ESL students, and so (as far as I can tell) this skill is assessed in that section.

Calling ESL a "bludge" is also very demeaning to those who come to Australia at the age of say, 13, and struggle greatly to learn the language to sit these compulsory exams. I'm sure you would not find it a bludge to learn (for example) German to the level that is required of ESL students in only 5 or so years. Keeping in mind that ESL students are still required to write one full text response and one full point of view essay. It appears to be a bludge to you because you've grown up with English, so of course it would be significantly easier for you. I think you've been quite unfair in your labelling of ESL and advise you to reconsider your position.

Oh dear. Jokes bro, jokes!

[bubble sunglasses]

 "I know a guy who came to Australia in year 8 from a country where not only was English unknown to him beforehand, but his other language read right-to-left and used an entirely different written script to that of English.

He tried his level best to become fluent and by year 12 held a fairly good vocabulary and had few problems conversing. But when it came to writing an essay (which must be soundly structured and have deep thought put into it) it gave him great difficulty to produce. He wasn't dumb, but he also wasn't the smartest guy I've ever met. If he had been in normal English, he would have struggled a helluva lot more than he did in ESL.

I don't think it's fair of you to say that 5 years is enough to get you up to the standard of, say, the top 9% (40+) who have been using English their whole life and of which English 3+4 is the culmination of 13 years of learning, not 5."

 Hebrew eh? S'pose it would be considerably harder than if you had another proto-indo-european [dervied from Latin] language as you mother tongue. Although general education and knowledge also helps -I'd expect you to understand the French word "metaphysique" better than a French 10-year old, [even though you dropped French after year 10 and it was far from awe-inspiring for you.] When did Mao and Ahmad come to Australia, by the way? I remember Ahmad saying he could have done ESL.

[Flaming_Arrow]

this is getting a bit out of topic....

[d0minicz]

Could you write something like, his opinion piece fails to convince the reader, etc?

[costargh]

Could you write something like, his opinion piece fails to convince the reader, etc?

No, not really

[vce01]

Could you write something like, his opinion piece fails to convince the reader, etc?

avoid making definitive statements like that... u can't predict how ppl are gonna react to what someone's written

[Flaming_Arrow]

i think you're meant to say HOW IT effects the reader not HOW EFFECTIVE it is.