Clarification details
Updated May 2015. This document has been updated in its entirety to address issues that arose from moderation.
Selection of writing
A range of draft writing (sometimes called a writing portfolio) is developed as part of the English programme. Students make a selection of their best two pieces of writing and craft them to publication standard. If using shorter text types, e.g. poetry or song lyrics, there may be more than two pieces of writing selected.
After students have reworked and reshaped their two best pieces so that each is a planned whole, teachers will award each piece a grade. Each piece is marked holistically. If the two pieces are significantly different in terms of their grades (i.e. one piece best fits Merit while the other best fits Achieved), the student has only met the ‘selection’ requirement at the lower grade, i.e. Achieved.
Submissions of assessed work for moderation require only those selected pieces for which the grade was awarded.
Text types
The text type, including the identified purpose and specified target audience, must provide students with the opportunity to produce writing at level 7 of the curriculum. For example, a book for eight year olds or a blog for ‘tween girls’ would limit a student’s opportunity to achieve. Personal letters and diary entries require a narrative voice that is sufficiently complex to express increasingly sophisticated ideas.
Some text types, such as speech or interview transcripts, are not appropriate for this standard as they are primarily aimed at listeners, not readers of written text. Transcripts may be used as draft pieces and re-crafted into an appropriate text type, such as an article or opinion piece for a newspaper.
Information pieces such as Wikipedia entries do not give students the opportunity to meet the standard.
Integrated writing
Writing tasks can be integrated with other parts of the English programme, although the pieces of writing will require further crafting before they are ready to be assessed against this writing standard. The use of written language to create effects is not a requirement of other standards, so this must be considered when offering programme integration.
Crafting may involve restructuring the piece so that a central idea/thread/argument is sustained. It will also require reworking the piece so the language is appropriate for the selected text type.
For Achieved, this involves:
- appropriate, deliberate and precise selection of a wide range of vocabulary
- a variety of sentence length and structures
- accurate use of text conventions.