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"Reflections of a language teacher.

Always learning."

Writing Tasks That Actually Prepare Students for GCSEs (Focus on Higher) - Not Just Fill Time

Let me be honest about something. I spent years setting writing tasks that were, in hindsight, busywork dressed up as learning. Fill in the gaps. Copy the model answer. Write five sentences about your family using the sentence starters on the board. Students were writing. Pens were moving. The room was quiet. It looked like learning. It wasn't. The problem only became clear when I started reading the new GCSE German specification carefully - not just skimming it, but actually

Teaching and learning

Silvia Bastow

12 minutes ago9 min read

Why students underperform in GCSE writing – and how over-scaffolding and misunderstandings about “complex language” make it worse

From a GCSE examiner’s point of view, I believe most students do not underperform in writing because they lack ideas, motivation or effort. Much more often, they underperform because they have been taught a version of GCSE writing that does not reflect how writing is actually assessed. Year after year, the same issues surface in exam papers. Students rely heavily on scaffolds , they misunderstand what “complex language” really means and accuracy at sentence level is sacr

Teaching and learning

Silvia Bastow

Jan 47 min read