Once you realise how the AQA GCSE Reading Exam works, how do you go about teaching it?
In a previous post, I explored the workings of the Reading Exam and discovered:
1. It's not a Reading Comprehension. You can give a correct answer to the question and score zero. What you have to do is show AQA you can translate the exact wording.
2. The words that are critical to getting the mark, are not the same words you teach pupils for the Speaking and Writing or the Topic content of the course.
So here is a lesson aimed at teaching pupils how to think about these questions.
On the board you can see my "comprehension" questions. And next to each question, I have given the pupils the answer. With a cross next to them. Because although they are correct answers to the question, they would not be sufficient for a mark from AQA.
This means pupils are now actively looking to improve the answers on the board. They know to pay attention to giving an answer which doesn't just answer the question, but which shows you understand all the words in the text.
So for Question 2, the answer "They argued" is a correct answer. But it could score 0 because the sentence actually said, "They started to argue." We know from the She was impressed that they grew vegetables on PART of the school field answer that including words which are irrelevant to the question is expected by AQA.
Question 6 isn't in the photo. It was, "Why was everyone happy?" And the inAQAdequate answer was "Because the couple were in love and finally got married." The AQAdequate answer was, "To see a couple so much in love finally get married after so many years of being engaged." With the emphasis on words like so and so many.
Here's a brief summary of how the lesson was set up.
1. Pupils had previously learned words for talking about the topic of relationships and family celebrations. So they knew uncle, wedding, speech, argue, in love for Speaking and Writing about the topic.
2. I read them the text (below) and they listened out for any vocabulary items from the topic list.
3. I gave them the text and they followed as I read it aloud. They then turned it over and told me everything they thought had happened.
4. With the text again in front of them, I asked them comprehension questions and they told me the answers, showing they understood what the situation was and what had happened. With all the gory detail of the events, but NOT with every word translated. Because they were responding to the meaning and the story, not looking for words like so much or started to.
5. I wrote the questions on the board that you can see above. Deliberately designed to not reward what the pupils had told me they understood. And as you saw, I put the "right but wrong" answers next to the question. Pupils wrote their answers, including all the words from the sentence, not just the ones that answered the original question.
This focused the pupils on what AQA want, which is not an answer that shows comprehension. But an answer which shows you can translate every word. And with particular focus on the sorts of words that you won't be working on for the Speaking and Writing Topics.
Interesting that the new GCSE promises to sort out the problems with the Listening and Reading exams. Their solution is to restrict them to High Frequency non Topic vocabulary. And for pupils to answer the questions by showing word by word parsing. But it seems that the Listening and Reading exams are already very much like this.
It seems that actually the proposals will mean keeping the Listening and Reading exams very much the same.
And worse. Part of the issue currently is that there is a mismatch between the language tested in the Listening/Reading exams and the language taught for the Speaking/Writing exams. Which most people would solve by making the Listening/Reading better reflect what the pupils are learning to say and write. But no. The new GCSE proposes making the Speaking/Writing exams more like the Listening/Reading exam.
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