Assessment

Examination tasks will always be based on the syllabus content. In any given year examiners will choose a broadly representative range of elements from the syllabus.

1. General Principles

• Candidates should be prepared to meet, in various combinations, situations and tasks from the whole syllabus content.
• The tasks encountered in the examination in the four skills of listening, reading, speaking and writing will have "real life" validity or will be preparatory for real tasks.
• The language encountered in listening and reading tasks will be authentic where possible and of real use to learners.
• Assessment in the four skills will be concerned primarily with the receipt and transmission of meaning.

2. Core Objectives

All candidates will be assessed on their ability to

• demonstrate an understanding of the spoken target language in brief and more extended forms in a variety of registers and situations
• demonstrate an understanding of the written target language in brief and more extended forms in a variety of registers
• express themselves with relative fluency and correctness in the target language both in speech and in writing in order to describe, obtain and convey information, offer explanations, and express ideas, opinions and feelings.

3. Differentiation

The syllabus aims to cater for a wide range of pupil ability. Assessment will be at Ordinary and Higher levels. While the syllabus is the same for both levels, the performance targets will involve language use of varying degrees of complexity.

Differentiation will be effected by means of Mark Allocation/Weighting of Skills. In the ongoing language acquisition process, receptive skills (listening and reading) develop earlier and to a greater degree than do productive skills (speaking and writing). In differentiating between Ordinary and Higher level assessment, the receptive skills will, taken together at Ordinary level, be accorded a greater emphasis in terms of total available marks than will the corresponding skills at Higher level. As a result, more marks will be allocated to productive skills at Higher Level than at Ordinary Level.

Mark Allocation

Assessment Criteria

These will take account of

• ability to transfer meaning
• degrees of accuracy and appropriateness of language, including the range of vocabulary and structures used.

4. Format

The examination will assess a candidate's ability to

• understand the spoken language
• understand the written language
• communicate in the spoken language
• communicate in the written language.

Within each of these assessment objectives the language and examination tasks will arise from the subject content.

Oral Assessment

The oral component of assessment will consist of general conversation, based on the syllabus content and ONE of these options:
Project: candidates may avail of the option of discussing a project the candidate has worked on and which is relevant to the syllabus content
Picture sequence: story narration and brief discussion arising from the story.
Fifteen minutes will be allocated per candidate.
All candidates (Ordinary and Higher levels) will have the same oral examination.

Listening Comprehension

Candidates will be required to listen to a tape recording and to answer questions in English or Irish on what they have heard. They will be required to demonstrate an understanding of general information and specific details on a variety of aural stimuli from the subject content of the syllabus, including conversations overheard, public announcements, and extracts from radio and other sources. The texts for both levels will be the same. The questions at Ordinary level will contain more contextual information than those at Higher level.

Reading Comprehension

Candidates will be expected to demonstrate an understanding of, and extract relevant specific information from such texts as public signs, menus, timetables, brochures, guides, letters, newspaper or magazine articles and works of literature. Candidates will also be required to show an understanding of the cultural context in which the texts were written by writing short notes on key words or concepts arising in the texts. As can be seen from the table below, the two levels are differentiated by a number of comprehension tests and by the text types they are asked to comprehend.

Ordinary level

Information retrieval

The candidates will be presented with a compilation of short texts (advertisements, instructions, brief newspaper reports etc.).
The questions will demand specific points of information to be found in the texts.

Structuring extended discourse
The students are supplied with all the sentences from a narrative or dialogue. These are numbered and given in the wrong order. The students are required to indicate the correct order.

Comprehension test on continuous prose
One text will be set:

• narrative/imaginative

or

• informative (dealing with some aspect of Russian society or culture).

Higher level

Two continuous passages will be set as follows:

• a discursive or informative journalistic text dealing with some aspect of Russian society or culture
• a literary/narrative text

Structuring extended discourse
The students are supplied with all the sentences from a narrative or dialogue. These are numbered and given in the wrong order. The students are required to indicate the correct order.

Written Production
The tasks set will primarily require the candidate to use the target language for purposes of communication such as expressing feelings and attitudes, giving and obtaining information, describing, relating, offering explanations, summarising, elaborating, etc. At Ordinary level candidates are required to supply questions and short answers. At Higher level students are required to respond to an extended written stimulus and transcode or recode information.