Nine grade ten students whose spoken English was completely fluent and whose written work was losing them a grade and a half.
The problem in every case was the same. They wrote the way people speak here, which is efficient and clear and is not what an examiner is reading for. Sentences ran on, tenses moved about within a paragraph, and paragraphs began wherever the page felt full.
The method was dull and it worked. One piece of writing a week, marked in full by hand with every correction explained, and then rewritten in the session with the marking beside them. The rewriting is the part almost nobody makes time for, and it is where the learning happens. A script handed back with a number on it teaches a student nothing except how they did.
By the twelfth week, seven of the nine were producing work a grade or more above where they started, measured on marked practice papers rather than on our impression.
We now run this group every year in the two terms before the examination.
