About Listening Comprehension 2020
I have heard on the grapevine that there are concerns about how the new Listening Comprehension component is going to work, when it is put into practice for the first time under real exam conditions next...
'target culture(s)'?
I have been busy analysing and marking samples of the new SL Oral Individual Interview. This is in preparation for a suite of pages to be published shortly, illustrating the range of performances and...
Of blobs and difficulty
Writing a sample Listening exam (see the page Listening exam #1 ) has made me think about the ways ‘difficulty’ is structured and assessed in exams. For seven years, I had the job of writing Texthandling...
Fashion & trend
The OUP Word of the Year award has been announced - and it's 'toxic'. It's a curious procedure, this 'Best of the Year' idea: why do we think it's worthwhile to nominate a Film of the Year, or a Van of...
Nowt s'queer as folk
When I was growing up in Yorkshire, the phrase above (Eng.trans: 'There is nothing so strange as people') was a commonplace, used as a coda to any tale of bizarre human behaviour. This bit of pithy wisdom...
Howards End revisited
I have just re-read E.M. Forster’s Howards End. I first read it at university, as part of the Cambridge LitCrit production line of 2/3 novels per week + critical background + essay + tutorial, and it...
The wit of Bojo
I find Boris Johnson fascinating ... well, make that ‘appallingly fascinating’, to be more precise. As an example of great intelligence and great charm, combined with an enormous ego and ruthless manipulative...
Life & Works
What can we learn about works of literature by studying the author’s life? This issue has been raised for me by a discussion of a student’s proposed Extended Essay, dealing with the relation between Sylvia...
Rigid versus flexible
The words ‘rigid versus flexible’ have been scrawled in my untidy list of blog ideas for quite a while. Suddenly, to my huge surprise, I find that objective psychological research seems to provide some...
On stupidity
There seems to have been an awful lot of Stupidity around lately. I try to keep calm, intoning mantras ("DoooooooooooH"), and doing my best to avoid the dangerous pages of the newspaper ... which unfortunately...