Write with your Head, Not with your Heart

Christopher Walker, Poland

Christopher Walker is a writer and English teacher working at International House Integra in Bielsko-Biala, Poland. He also examines for Cambridge, and is generally interested in exam preparation classes. His website is www.closelyobserved.com, E-mail: closelyobserved@gmail.com

One of the great joys of teaching English as a foreign language – and one so positive that it rather makes up for having to teach third conditional every year – is that I get to know so much about my students and the lives they live. I love those occasional laid-back lessons when all my students want to do is relax and chat, and I can sit silently in my chair, making notes for the error correction mini-lesson to follow; it is an experience as revitalising as an afternoon coffee. Their fluency is impressive; the ideas appear in flurries like Poland’s spring snow; there are smiles all around the room.

And then I give my students an exam-specific writing task to attempt, and the reality comes crashing down all around them.

What happens is simple and in some ways tragic: they approach the task as they might a question asked in general conversation. And while in a conversation tangents can be interesting avenues worth exploring, in a written task they are a landmine waiting to obliterate your points tally.

This is not a universal truth – let me say that much right at the outset. Some of my students are naturally talented writers who are able to match their ability to the task in front of them. But for others, this is not the case. Their personality comes out in the writing task, but in an uncontrolled way that is more like an embarrassing eruption of gas than a sparkling stream of conscious expression.

To understand how to deal with what is going wrong, we have to turn to what, for many teachers, is a surprisingly unlikely source: The Teachers’ Handbook.

I specialise in Exam Preparation classes. I take pride in knowing more about these exams than any of my peers, partly because it means that when they’re stuck, they have no option but to turn to me for advice. I have read the Handbook from cover to cover as if it was the latest George R.R. Martin – spoiler alert; nobody dies except for in the Story writing task for FCE for Schools. I know precisely what is expected of every student in every exam at every level in the CEFR Framework. My aim each year is to convey some of this knowledge to my charges, in the hope that they might absorb something and approach the coming exam with a better chance of getting a passing grade. But there are times when I think my methods might be too holistic, too open to interpretation; in short, too nice.

The most critical case occurred recently when I inherited a new group, a team of half a dozen adults who were entering the final phase of their B2 level exam preparations. This was an exam quite unknown to me, the Pearson Test of English, General edition. So the first thing I did was to work carefully through the Handbook, much like an explorer of old consulting maps and charts in the hopes of discovering the Northern Passage.

Then I gave the students some written homework. In Section 8 of the PTE, candidates must write up to ninety words from a given prompt; so I expected in the next lesson to receive a set of letters, each one competently covering the three aspects introduced by the rubric, and each one running to about a third of a sheet of paper.

That was not what I received. The answers were all over the place. One student discovered that the task had tickled her fancy, and wrote a two-hundred word essay. Another was so distracted by something tangentially connected to the task that she wrote about that, and nothing else. The results were fascinating – or that’s how I would have described them, if they had been given a more freeform homework to do. In actual fact, I was horrified.

The students were unintentionally sabotaging their own progression.
In the next lesson we had an emergency feedback session.

“The way you’re writing is all wrong,” I said to open the proceedings. Then there was a thud that echoed around the room, as each student’s jaw dropped and hit the desk before them.

I took them through the Handbook – specifically, the assessment criteria for the writing. First of all, we addressed the problem of the word count. In Pearson exams, these are pretty strict. For Section 8 you’re supposed to write no more than ninety words, as I mentioned before; but the tolerance is between 72 and 132 words. Any more than this and you automatically lose both points in the ‘Formal Requirements’ part of the mark scheme. While this is unlikely to cause a candidate to receive a failing grade – there are many points available, and they are scaled down to a total of five for what is called the ‘Analytic Mark’ in each writing task – it could prove quite critical with my own students’ chances, given that they were borderline candidates to begin with.

Then we looked at ‘Completing the task’, for which another two points are available. To quote Pearson, to receive both marks there must be “Full engagement with the prompt with regards to content.” One point is available to candidates who only consider some aspects of the prompt. One of my students had written a lengthy diatribe on something only obliquely relevant; she would have lost four out of four points here.

This was a crying shame, quite literally: I could see the tears welling in the student’s eyes when I delivered my feedback. Nobody likes to be told that they’re doing something wrong. What made the situation all the more painful was that the student needed to pass the exam to receive a refund on the cost of the course; she was being sponsored by the kindergarten she taught at, but only on the condition that she came out the other end with that all-important piece of paper.

Round the class we went. This student had written too much. This one hadn’t written a letter, but something that looked more like an essay. The next had covered only one of the three content points; the next one beside her, none.

“The problem I can see is not with your writing,” I said, sensing that my students needed some small words of comfort to pull them back from the looming abyss. “The problem is that you’re writing with your heart, not with your head. Remember that you need to pass the exam. You don’t need to please the examiner with your opinions or your personalities. You need to please them with your English.”

We proceeded to draw up a template on the board that the students could follow. Four boxes, each with an associated word count. Fifteen words were allocated to the lead-in, so that we could establish it was a letter we were writing, and then twenty-five words for each of the points we had to address.

“Say one thing, expand on it, and move on,” I said.

I put my students to practicing. Some got it immediately, and the relief on their faces when they realised that not so very much was being asked of them was plain to see. Others struggled, railing against the restrictions.

“You have to remember your target,” I said. “Your target is to pass the exam, and to do that you have to write with your head.”

“Not my heart,” my students echoed, as if they were already turning the expression into a mantra.

And a mantra it did become. We referred to the assessment criteria as our Bible, and each of the subsections as Commandments that must be followed. Will you be assessed on organisation? Then let’s break our work into paragraphs, one idea in each, and link them together. Let’s explain cause and effect with ‘because’ and let’s use ‘but’ to show contradiction. Will you be assessed on range? Then let’s begin by describing the ‘fascinatingly informative’ article we’ve just read, before launching ourselves at the rubric.

When my students were reliably able to produce letters under one hundred words long, that explored all of the content points, and that had a nice variety of language buried among some better-organised sentences, it was time to move on to the next piece of writing. In Section 9 candidates have a choice between a formal-style essay, and an informal article.

“Before we start,” I said, “we have to remember a couple of things. Firstly?”

“Yes, yes,” one said. “Write with your head, not with your heart.”

“Exactly. But we also need to remember who we’re writing for. It’s not the examiner, precisely, but who the examiner is pretending to be. For an essay, it’s a teacher, and for an article, it’d be whoever bought the magazine that the article appears in. Each reader will expect different things.”

We talked for a while about what this meant. Teachers like to know that their students pay attention to them, and so the essay must contain enough detail to convince the teacher that they had invested their time in the class wisely. Articles, on the other hand, need to entertain as well as inform, or their readers will think their time and money had been wasted.

The light in the eyes of my students dimmed appreciably at these new obstructions. Almost immediately most of them discounted the article as an option for them in the exam – and rightly so: it is difficult enough for native speakers to write entertainingly, as this very article might illustrate, and to expect a struggling candidate to do so might be pushing things too far.

We focussed our attention then on the essay, much as an emergency doctor might in triage. Back to the Bible we went, and we planned out what shape we might give our essay.

The first example task had us discussing how the use of technology had changed between the generations.

“Remember, write with your head,” I said, fearful now that the words, so often repeated, were turning into white noise in my students’ ears. “What I mean here is, don’t spend too long thinking about what to write.”

I’d noticed this problem already. When I asked one of my students how long they generally spent on their written homework, their answer of two hours or more rather shocked me; most of that time they had spent actually thinking how to begin. Either they had been overwhelmed with ideas, or they had had none at all.

“Take yourself out of the writing,” I said. “Don’t worry about being original. The examiners will read hundreds of these essays. They want good English. That’s it. So, when we talk about technology, what’s the first thing you can think of?”

“Mobile phones?” one ventured.
“Absolutely. So let’s only write about that. Think about what you use mobile phones for now. Make a list with your partner of the first three things you can come up with.”

Diligently they set themselves to this task; within a couple of minutes they were ready.

“Wonderful. Now, looking at our Bible, we need to prove to the examiners that we can write to B2 level. We need to work on our ‘Range’ more, and we can do that very easily by comparing the present and the past.”

We constructed sentences to illustrate the point. At the low end, we used ‘whereas’ to show the difference between now and before; at the high end, for those who felt they could do it, we used the second conditional to show how the present could be different.

“If I didn’t have a mobile phone,” one student said to round off a good opening paragraph, “I wouldn’t be able to contact my family all the time.”

Now that they had the general concept, we looked again at the Formal Requirements, noting that the word limit tolerance meant they could write no more than 220 words; the rubric gave an upper limit of 200, which meant they could only go ten percent over.

“You’ve got too many ideas here,” I said to one student, whose writing was approaching the three hundred word mark. “Take this one out and the essay is perfect.”

“Don’t count the words,” I said to another. “In the exam you won’t have the time. Either learn how long two hundred words is in your handwriting, or do this: count the words in the first line, and multiply by the number of lines. That should give you a rough idea.”

Little by little, my students improved, and when I marked their work against the assessment criteria, I was able to tell them honestly that they were moving in the right direction. In some cases, the new approach was nearly doubling the number of points the student could accrue in the ‘Analytic’ section of the assessment.

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