The Secret of GCSE Reading Exams

 Please don't tell my Year 11. Because they think that I carefully planned their lesson this week. And I didn't. I just understand how the Reading Exam seems to work.

With their Speaking Exam done, and all their books and resources at home, lessons now are a mishmash of vocabulary revision, exam technique, past paper Listening and Reading questions, core repertoire for the writing exam, and keeping relaxed and positive.

In the AQA spec, there is a very long list of vocabulary for each topic. Which I don't think I have looked at since 2016 when the spec was rushed out. We start Spanish in Year 9 and we don't have time to learn all the recondite words for "hake" or "freckles". We used to have Quizlet sets that contained all the vocabulary from the list that had made it into the Viva textbook. But as it was just random lists of words that didn't fit with the core repertoire pupils are developing, it didn't work. Our new Quizlet sets develop the repertoire for giving opinions, justifying them, talking about the past and future, narrating stories, hope, conflict, disappointment. And some topic vocabulary that fits with these structures and sticks to the pupils' growing snowball of language. The previous sets gave a nice even covering of Spanish which just melted away.

So if "hake" and "freckles" are in the exam, then our pupils are particularly exposed to danger. Because they won't know it. And "hake", which I had always used as an example of why you don't need to frighten pupils with the indigestible list in the spec, DID come up in 2020. Even so, when you look at the exams, unless this year there is a new exam setter with a new approach, it's not the topic words which are most important. (Fingers crossed.)

I haven't shown my pupils the pages and pages of topic vocabulary in the spec. But I have printed off as a booklet pages 24-40 (AQA Spanish spec) of General Vocabulary. They think this is quite enough! These are words that have more "function" within the language than "meaning" relating to the external world.

So, this week, we spent the first part of the lesson repeatedly testing each other on random words from this General Vocabulary section. And making up sentences to put them in context or to see them in context and make them memorable. Then I opened a past paper and picked a random question. This was where my class thought I had deliberately planned the words that we had seen. The entire text was made up of the words we had been testing. And it's not a lucky coincidence.

I don't want to show you the text because it's behind the AQA security to keep it safe for mocks. But here's a break-down of the words it contains.

You can see there is a preponderance of non topic words. And that's without accounting for the fact that the words in column 1 were repeated while the words in column 3 appeared only once. The first sentence of the text was 17 words long. And only one word was a "topic" word. The "topic" words are also not particularly abstruse (no hake here) or are easily recognised cognates. (A cognate does NOT have to be identical. It means "twin" words which are born together. And twins can be identical or non identical.)

We have seen from the Listening Papers, that the non topic words aren't just important in how the examiners build the texts, but also in what they accept as the answer. Most famously in the "What most impressed her was the school grew fruit and vegetables on PART of the school field" example. A perfectly good answer to "What impressed her?" (They grew fruit and veg on the school field) was not acceptable without the words "part of".

So maybe actually we should tell my Year 11. It wasn't a tightly planned lesson. And it wasn't lucky chance either. These are the words that matter in the exam.

And someone should tell the new GCSE panel (if it still exists) too. They sold us the new GCSE on the grounds that a limited list of vocabulary, based on high frequency words (no hake here) would solve the issues of the hated Reading and Listening exams.

But it turns out that the hated Reading and Listening exams are already based on these non topic words. The problem is that the exams are not about testing comprehension. The texts are often slightly bizarre to stop pupils deducing the language from the context. Because they want to test "knowledge" of items of language, not ability to make sense of the passage. The markscheme insists on pupils showing word by word parsing (PART of the field) even when it's irrelevant to the actual question.

So the new GCSE is promising even more of the same when it comes to the Listening and Reading exams. If you responded happily to the "consultation" thinking they were going to end the tricks and traps and nitpicky questions, then they have sold you a cat not a hare (as they say in Spanish).

And that is only the half of it. My pupils spend most of their time working on their repertoire for Speaking and Writing. Being able to develop their answers spontaneously, express themselves, speak more and more fluently. This is what they love about Spanish and what I love about teaching it. But even if you don't care about that and want to focus on "knowledge", then it's having that growing core repertoire that means the vocabulary has something to stick to. Creating a new GCSE which doesn't reward spontaneous developed answers where pupils can extend their answers in response to further questioning or prompting, is going to ruin language learning in this country, the same way the Controlled Assessment GCSE destroyed it for a generation.

The current GCSE is not great for Reading and Listening. It's OK for Speaking and Writing, especially compared to what we had before. The new GCSE proposes to "improve" the Reading and Listening but in fact will keep them very much the same. And under the cover of these bogus promises of "improvement", it will completely destroy Speaking and Writing. It is going to get rid of assessing how well pupils can use their language, and replace it with testing how much "knowledge" they can recall. And they are shooting themselves in the foot. Because it's taking ownership of the language, using it to express meaning, and getting better at using it, that gives pupils the core of language that everything else sticks to.

If I seem to be casting nasturtiums in this post, it may just be that coming from a week where pupils did an oral exam by speaking spontaneously, extending their answers in response to prompts for more information, and interacting with the examiner, I am angry at the idea of this being snatched away again by people who claim to want to improve on the situation in 2016, but actually in effect want to return us to it.

Update from the future (2024): We may have seen off the threat to developing speaking and writing in the new GCSE. Seems like a win!