“There's nothing a teacher treasures more than to see a pupil succeed.”

Whether you are doing a Writing exam or Coursework,  you need to understand what is required of you. Ask your teacher for the marking scheme  and/or look at this example of coursework’s marking scheme . It will help you getting the grades you are aiming for. For example, the use of tenses: if you know that by using 3 different tenses you get more points, wouldn’t you make sure that you have a “bank” of sentences in the past, present and future? There are certain things that you have to do, whatever the subject, i.e give opinions with reasons.  Have a stock of different opinions with reasons in 3 different tenses!

How should you prepare?

Lets go back to Year 9. You have done some very good writing exercises which your teacher’s corrected. Now, did you rewrite them and re-submit them for correcting? No? That is a shame because you have the basis of many essays there. Rewriting will help you memorise tenses and structures. File them into sections. For example, “holidays” or “my family”  “sports” etc..

In years 10 and 11, you will also do many exercises based on topics but you will  have reading and listening comprehensionsas well. Use these (you can ask your teacher for the Listening comprehensions scripts) to highlights really good sentences and copy them (you need to do this, remember?). They will also serve you as models: change the tense in theses sentences and also who is doing the action. For example, you have a great sentence which uses “je” and the present. Change it to “elle” or “on” and put it in the future.

You will see from reading your marking scheme, that using varied structures will give you more points. One way to do this would be to use different pronouns. You don’t want to write a series of “je”, even if the subject is “my last holiday”, you have to use other pronouns, talk about what you sister/mother/brother/friends did etc... By the way, even though you will have to write mostly in the past, don’t! you still need to show off your present and future, and even better still, the imperfect! “I used to go on holiday to Scotland when I was little (add an opinion and a reason) but now we go to the south-west of England, where we spend 3 weeks in a campsite (give a reason!) . However, last year, my mum wanted a change and my parents organised a trip to France. My brother wasn’t happy (give a reason!) but my sister was excited because she wanted to .....” etc..., I hope you can see where I’m going with this!

Anyway, it’s not just tenses and opinions with reasons which make great sentences, but also “quality words” ( also known as connectives or High Frequency Words) and varied vocabulary. So you need to memorise your vocab. by doing your interactive exercises .

 

For a High Grade Pass you need Time expressions  Quality words Verbs and tenses

Examples of coursework titles/exam questions Education, Employment and Training House, Home and Daily Routine Home and Abroad Media, Entertainment and Youth Culture Social Activities, Health and Fitness

Why not have a look at some examples of work, to give you an idea of what kind of things you will have to do for your writing homework?

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