November 29, 2024 by Doug McCurry from BooBook Education
The Power of Personal Narrative:
The VCE English Exam Section B Writing Task
Since the 1990s the focus and emphasis given to writing in VCE English has been open to question, particularly as writing is not assessed as such in the exam.
It is laudable that this situation has been addressed in the 2024 study design. The replacement of the text-based Section B with a section called Creating a text is a significant rebalancing of the study.
The assessment of writing as such was removed from the exam with the introduction of a core and options system in the 1980s, and I don't think there has been any self-directed and generative writing in the exam since that time.
The writing done in the English exam is all more or less transactional, or, in the terms used by the new study design, the purposes of writing in the exam are to explain and argue but not to express and reflect. Many other systems in Australia and internationally have retained the assessment of expressive and reflective writing in external exams. This signal weakness of the VCE English exam has been happily addressed by the new Section B.
In these comments I want to describe and celebrate the great potential of the new Creating a Text section for bringing self-directed and generative writing back into the English exam, and for giving the possibility of personal writing an appropriate importance in VCE English.
This new exam section will allow expressive and reflective writing for personal purposes that was not been part of the previous English exam, which tested analysis of a text, comparative analysis of texts and analysis of argument and persuasive language. The previous course gave most emphasis to the receptive mode of reading rather than writing. In this piece I will discuss the importance of personal writing and some of the challenges and difficulties of teachers teaching and students preparing for the new Section B?
Comparing writing for Section B with Sections A and C?
The crucial characteristic of the new task is that it is largely self-directed and generative. Within certain constraints students choose what they are going to write about and how they are going to write about it. The constraints on choice are that they will be writing about one of four very broad Frameworks they have studied, and their response must be shaped in some discernible way by a set title and one of three pieces of stimulus material in a set.
The openness of this Section B task contrasts markedly with the Section A and C tasks. But the new task is not completely open because of the problems of preprepared and memorized responses. Learned material, whether personally prepared or plagiarized, is the besetting problem of English exams and writing tests.
The most important way of dealing with this assessment problem (in VCE English at least) is through the issue of relevance to the question. The biggest challenge in teaching Section A is in assisting students to analyse and interpret set questions and getting them to focus their comments about a text on the question. It is on the basis of relevance to the question that students are penalized for producing irrelevant and preprepared material. An aspect of preparing students to meet the challenge of relevance in Section A is to help them to see when and how they can make preprepared material relevant to a question. For me the aim in teaching for Section A is to help students prepare language (preferably at the level of words and phrases rather than sentences) that can be used to discuss a broad range of issues.
The challenge of assisting students with Section C is to give them concepts about the use of language in argument without the students using them in a formulaic fashion. In my view the best Section C responses are holistic (to use the term of the Examiners' Reports) and are written selectively and specifically about a piece of text rather that written to a formula that is applied to any text.
Personal and impersonal writing
The study design identifies four purposes for writing, and I think it is useful and meaningful to make a distinction between the purposes of writing to explain and argue on one hand and to reflect and express on the other. And these distinctions are more meaningful when they are seen as a more impersonal and more personal dualism.
We can see the difference between impersonal and personal writing in the kind of writing done in the other sections of the English exam, and the kind of writing done in other studies and exams.
Section C of the English exam is a completely impersonal writing task. Students are to analyse the material. They are not to evaluate the text, and it is a serious blemish if they make personal or evaluative comments about the text and the issue. This requirement for strictly impersonal analysis is one of the things that makes Section C the most difficult part of the exam. In my experience the work produced for Section C is significantly weaker than for Section A.
It might be thought that in Section A students are to make a personal response to the text, but this is not really the case. Rather than offering a personal response in Section A ('I like this kind of book.' or 'This character is repulsive') students are expected to write an analysis of the text as framed by the set question. The more impersonal and objective the analysis of the text seems, the more likely a response will be judged appropriate and convincing.
The exciting thing about the new Section B is that it does not require an impersonal, analytical response like Sections A and C do. This exam task not only gives students choice about what they are going to write about and how (based on the set title and one of the three stimuli), it allows, and in some respects even encourages, writing from a personal point of view.
The current Framework of Personal journeys directly encourages personal narrative writing, but the other Frameworks can also be treated impersonally or personally.
Rather that writing about Protest conceptually, philosophically or polemically, for instance, students could write about it in personal terms:
- What protests have they seen and what did they think of them?
- What might they want to protest about and why?
- What protests have they been involved in and why?
They can also write about Play and Country in personal rather than impersonal terms.
Students who are good at analytical and conceptual thinking and writing could do very well with these more impersonal approaches in the exam, but in my experience analytical and conceptual writing are not typical strengths of Year 12 students. Most students are more comfortable with specific and concrete matters that are within their personal experience. They now have the opportunity to deal with personal views and experiences in this Section B exam task.
Some possible approaches to the Section B Exam Task
The following comments are prompted by reading a couple of hundred Section B semester exam responses from different schools.
I marked the Journeys and Country Frameworks and have not marked Protest or Play responses, so this has perhaps shaped my comments. It seemed that many of the Country responses could have been written for Journeys and vice versa, and a significant question about this task is how different the responses should be to different Frameworks, titles and stimuli.
Most of the students I read did not seem particularly concerned about linking the response to the title and the stimulus, which prefigures a problem for the end of year marking. When is a student unloading preprepared, memorised or plagiarised material? And what impact does a negligible or implausible linking of a response to the set task have on the score given?
I am not sure who published the tasks I marked, but the prompt sets seemed to have a big impact on what the students did. The VCAA sample tasks follow a model of the first stimulus being a proposition, the second stimulus being an image, and the third stimulus being a kind of poetic or expressive comment. Unfortunately, in the tasks I marked the first proposition was poorly framed in both sets, and this might have skewed the approaches of students to the tasks.
What did students do in Section B?
All students that I read felt they were up to the task and could do something. On the whole, the writing was less strained and more confident than in other sections of the exam. I had a sense that the students seemed more literate in this self-directed task than in sections A and C. It would seem that students can write more confidently in more self-directed and personal tasks than in apparently simpler transactional tasks.
My marks were higher for Section B than for the other sections, and I found it easier than usual to give high marks in this Section. The writing also seemed better in English Section B than in GAT Section A, and that task is supposed to be a straight-forward 'literacy task'. The GAT writing task is actually compromised by having to use detailed stimulus material.
In their Section B responses students rarely ignored and were in general not anxious about the constraints of using the title and a stimulus, but often the linkage to the title and the stimulus was very indirect or only implied.
There were some clear signs of different directions from teachers in the student responses. One Some schools seemed to see fictional narrative as the standard response, and others seemed to see personal narrative as the standard response.
The most striking thing about the responses was that there was very little discussion of the Frameworks as such. Ideas in the Framework were only dealt with indirectly, and the responses were mostly examples of ideas in the Framework rather than analysis of or argument about those ideas. In that sense these responses were the opposite of a response to a thematic text response task.
The Eltham High School Anthology of Student Writing
Before commenting further on the responses I have read, I should mention the Eltham High School Anthology of student writing which is part of my frame of reference for some of these comments.
(It can be found at https://www.elthamhighanthology.com/. I was not marking the work of Eltham students.)
We are told on the Eltham High website that this valuable anthology is 'curated' by students, and it does genuinely seem to be the case. It does feel as though the editors are teenagers and the presumed audience is teenagers. This is not the audience for exam responses, which should be written with English teachers in mind. Some of the following comments are shaped by the differences between the pieces in the Eltham Anthology and what students offered in these exam responses I read. As I explained in study guide I have written for Section B, it would be good to look at and discuss pieces in the Eltham Anthology with students. I think this discussion could be of as much value as discussing the set mentor texts.
Preprepared responses
Thankfully the new Section B responses were quite unlike the dreadful and vapid generality of Section B theme responses or the comparison and contrast responses of recent exams.
There were few evidently preprepared responses, although that does not mean there will not be a problem deciding what to do with such responses or responses that are barely linked to the set task at the end of the year. It seemed to me that most students were not sufficiently wary of the danger of seeming to produce a preprepared essay. They didn't feel that they had to do much to link their response to the title and a stimulus.
It seems that teachers should warn students more emphatically about the dangers of seeming to produce a preprepared answer, and students should expect to produce a substantially new response to a title and piece of stimulus in the exam room. It would be best, until we know how things will be interpreted in the marking (if can we ever get to know without being markers), to clearly link the response to a stimulus and title at the end of the year.
What do students write about?
There was some pure fiction and a few rehashes of classic or popular stories in the responses I read. One student felt that Legally Blonde could do with another rendition. There was fortunately little adventure or mindless action narrative. There was some teenage angst, and, in comparison with the Eltham Anthology, there was little teenage love life. This romantic restraint was probably, although not necessarily, a good thing.
There was a lot of family (near and extended) which was mostly celebratory and sometimes mournful. Family cultural backgrounds were also prominent. Adjusting to a new country was a crucial experience for some, and some of the ‘older Australians’ were conscious of their own cultural background.
Not surprisingly, school life and particularly the stress of high school were prominent. Many of the students were thinking about themselves as in a period of transition and were thinking about what the near future might hold. They wrote about the end of high school and the beginning of a new life. On the whole, the kinds of responses offered were about things worth writing about.
Most of the responses were about more of less personal experiences and issues. I had wondered in anticipation whether this personal element would be prominent in student responses and was heartened to see that it was. In my view the best approach to this task for most students is to ground their writing in personal experience because it is the least dangerous approach and is the one that is most likely to have impact on the reader. I am certainly interested in what students have to say about their experiences from their perspective. And I think most English teachers are.
Unfortunately, there has been little opportunity to write about such things in the VCE.
Possible approaches to Section B
In reading the Section B responses I found that I could roughly sort them into propositional discussion, personal narrative and fictional narrative.
The most surprising things about the responses I have read is that hardly few wrote propositional discussions. Considering they had presumably discussed the Framework in detail it is surprising that few choose to write conceptual discussions or arguments about the Frameworks. In my view, such discussions are not as good a bet for students as is personal narrative, but they are a much better bet than writing fictional narrative.
Personal narrative is usually less likely to lead students into ideas they cannot deal with and is more likely to generate an authentic student voice. Writing grounded in personal experience is likely to produce genuine thought in areas in which students can write with authority.
The big issues about personal narratives for students is to keep them restrained and measured (not overwritten and melodramatic), and whether exam markers (or the marking leadership?) can see the strength of quite simple and direct personal writing. Such writing is what I would encourage most students to produce, and the question is whether markers will see the quality of such pieces. My experience says if it is left up to them, markers will reward quite simple and direct personal writing.
In writing assessments, there is always the danger that complexity of language is taken to be the same as complexity of thought. This wide-spread heresy can be seen in the NAPLAN writing marking guides and the Australian Core Skills Framework. And this heresy is seen as a 'discriminator' in some writing tests. One hopes that English exam reports will show an awareness of and reject this heresy in ways they have not done in the past.
What do most students do best?
Working in the writing area of study will partly involve finding out how students writing best in test conditions. In summary, my view is that most students write best (and with least risk) in test conditions when they write personal narrative or from the particular experience of the writer. By personal narrative I mean writing about more or less actual experiences of the writer. Such writing avoids the dangers of discursive and argumentative writing in that it does not depend on being well-informed and having a strong impersonal argument. If the experience is real, told honestly and thoughtfully, personal narrative can be stronger than the other kinds of writing most students might produce.
It is very hard to write a fictional narrative to constraints in test conditions and fiction can easily turn out to be sensational, melodramatic or sentimental. Some of the strongest pieces I marked were comparatively simple and direct thoughts about the writer's situation and experiences.
Students should be aware of the dangers of empty drama, melodrama and sentimentality. They should also be discouraged from writing exaggerated and over-written description. Heightened description can easily seem exaggerated and bogus.
Fictional narratives can be written that are specific, concrete and within the experience of student writers. But writing a good fictional narrative is not easy, and fiction can tempt student writers to imagine things they have not experienced, and know little about. It is difficult to make such fictional narratives vivid and convincing.
There was little that was sensational or sentimental in the student responses I read. One the other hand, florid description, particularly in the opening, seemed a quite common formula. This description often seemed inauthentically forced and overwritten. Such description is difficult to do well without it seeming meretricious, or merely decorative.
Vividness in writing
Vividness in writing is of course a significant characteristic but it needs to seem genuinely prompted by a situation rather than being a self-conscious display. I will remember the vividness of lived experience in the account by one student of a crisis in which, when being hugged by her mother, she could feel her mother's racing heartbeat. Similarly, there was real feeling in another student's imagined picture of his father, after painfully separating from the family, in a rented house, seated at a card table and eating his dinner alone. Again, this was not adjectival description, and it has the authentic vividness of lived experience. It is not descriptive writing as such. It is certainly not a matter of descriptive 'word choices'. This vividness has the circumstantial specificity of lived experience.
While personal narratives can be strong, students should not be afraid of writing a discussion of an idea in the stimulus, because it is easier -if they have the skills- to show that they can think in such a discussion. It is harder to do this in a personal narrative and even harder in a fictional narrative.
While personal narrative is the easiest and safest way of dealing with this exam task, the possible danger of this approach is that it can be very strong for the writer, but it can seem a bit obvious to the reader. Saying I love my grandparents and where they live can seem a bit commonplace. You have to be careful with this kind of personal writing and focus on something distinctive about the situation. See the mentor text by Amy Duong for a very good example of this kind of writing that has real impact. Her way of developing that text is also well worth discussing with students.
The way some students tried to get around the obviousness of what they had to say was to try to present experiences (arriving at my grandparent's place) with a good deal of descriptive detail. Such descriptive detail can make an obvious situation feel strong, but it can also seem overwritten and fake. It hard it is to write good description without straining.
Quite a few pieces seemed to begin with a sensuous description that looked like a formula. Students do not want to look like they are using a formula, and they don't want to look like they are writing formula description. Less can be more in description. Overwritten description can get into all sorts of problems. Big descriptions must be done cautiously.
It was good that there was not much fiction in the responses I read to this task because good fiction is hard to write, especially in test conditions. There are dangers in writing about things students really do not know about. Their lack of knowledge can be obvious and a weakness.
There were some good pieces that imagined a realistic future for the writer, and this seemed to work quite well. It was a topic that mattered to the writers, and they could be ground their thoughts in actual possibilities.
The upshot
Before I read any exam scripts, I had been inclining to the view that I would prepare students for two Frameworks from which to choose when they saw the set tasks. I now think I would definitely do this because the Framework statements in the study design are easy to deal with, and the relationship between the statements and the set task is not clear and certain and may be quite indirect. The issue in the exam is primarily the set title and the stimulus rather than the Framework itself. The idea of the Framework is in the criteria for assessment and so the title and the stimulus cannot be interpreted in a way that is outside the scope of the Framework. I would want my students to have a choice of titles and stimulus to write to in the exam.
I regard helping students to work out how they write best in and out of exam conditions as much more important and beneficial in this area of study than substantive analysis of the Framework statements.
A class could prepare a couple of Frameworks with a selection of mentor texts. One can read all the mentor texts in less time than it takes to read a novel. It seems that the mentor texts do not have any direct meaning in doing a particular task, and I would use the most useful mentor texts for any Framework with students. I would certainly do the Amy Duong text whatever Frameworks I was doing.
Overall I found the student responses to this task were worthwhile pieces of writing and the area of study was shown to be a particularly valuable opportunity for students and teachers.
Some problems
The problems and challenges of the assessment were much as I had anticipated. Some students took very little notice of the title and the stimulus. Some were self-indulgent in writing something that seemed fun to them but that would be unlikely to seem much fun to an English teacher marking hundreds of scripts.
The drugged delusions of a dying addict are not something that can be readily fictionalised by most teenagers. Those who do know something of those experiences are unlikely to want to write about them in an exam. Space odysseys and cool adventures are very hard to write so as to have general appeal, especially with an hour to write them in.
Some of the best responses seemed very conscious of how little time and space they had. Time was not available for elaborate descriptions and stories had to be very compressed. Some of the best narratives had radical transitions signalled with no more than an asterisk or a heading. These students didn't linger on description and moved very quickly from one thing to the next. Such pieces were a set of compressed vignettes.
The need for feedback from VCAA in the Examination report
The Section B task design is what I and some of my ACER coworkers called ‘a questionless question’. Because it is a radical task design that is not in the normal way based on the underlying criterion of 'relevance to the question', the marking of Section B of the VCE English exam is particularly uncertain. We have to hope for clear indications of how things will be interpreted in the marking of this section of the exam. It will be most unsatisfactory if the account of Section B in the Exam Report for this year is as anodyne and opaque as is typical of VCE English exam reports.
The power of the personal
While I have primarily looked at approaches to Section B in terms of safety and effectiveness of writing in test conditions, there is another crucial issue to celebrate in the introduction of the possibility of personal writing into VCE English.
We usually try to sell learning to write better to senior students in terms of it being a valuable life skill, important in employment and as a means of improving one's scores in many subjects, but in my view the strongest inducement for students to develop their writing is for the purposes of personal expression and reflection.
Writing is a particularly valuable form of thought. In trying to work out what we think, and trying to think in writing we can see and do things that are difficult to do in the ongoing, real time rush of the inner monologue in the monkey mind. The theatre of the mind is not a composed script. And having a composed form of some of the inner drama is very valuable to us all.
And then there is the issue of writing growth and wellbeing. The value of writing, particularly reflective and expressive writing, in promoting well-being by enhancing self-awareness and confidence, and by reducing stress and fostering resilience, It is widely recognized and there is a lot of literature about it.
In learning to get their thoughts clear in writing students have an opportunity to work out where they are, what is happening to them, what they are doing, and their prospects for the future. I would try to sell learning to write better to students on the basis of what one can learn about oneself and one's experience through writing.
In the terms of the English study design, Section B gives us significant leverage as teachers of writing and allows us to encourage students to write on the basis of reflection and expression for personal purposes.
Conclusions
My enthusiasm for this Section of the exam was reinforced by marking scripts. It was a pleasure to mark substantial numbers of responses in an English exam that were worth writing and worth reading.
It is an important innovation that students now have the opportunity to write something that is personally significant for them in their VCE exams.
Congratulations to the VCAA and thanks to those responsible for this valuable innovation.
