Activity 10.3 Sample 1: mid-level Rater Comments:
This is an example of a mid-level response . The speaker covers the main points from the student letter and the conversation between the students, though some important details are missing. His explanation of the proposal is clear, as is his explanation about why eating in class might help some students concentrate but be distracting for other students. His discussion of the point about having parties is somewhat unclear, however, since he doesn’t explain that the man is against having parties during class time. A clearer way he could express this could be to say, “He doesn’t think using class time for parties is appropriate because students need that time to review for exams.” The speaker’s pronunciation is at times slightly difficult to understand and his pace is a bit slow with noticeable “uhs,” but overall the response is comprehensible. The response could be clearer with more variation in the grammatical structures used; for example, “we will less prepare,” would be more effective as “students would be less prepared.” Sample 1 Transcript: The newsletter suggest that, uh, students should, uh, be allowed to eat in class for two reasons. First of all, uh, eating in class may help students concentrate better, uh, because, uh, after a long class they can be very hungry. And the second reason is that, uh, they can have, uh, they can party at the end of the semester. However the man disagree with this. Uh, he, uh, gives two reasons. The first one, uh, is that, uh, he, uh, it’s maybe true that we can concentrate while we eat, but we will disrupt other because of the noise that we make while we are eating. And, uh, the second one is that, um, at the end of the semester, uh, more, most class will use that for reviewing for the exams, so using that time would not, uh, be appropriate and we will less prepare. Sample 2: high-level Rater Comments: The speaker gives a high-level response . She does not explicitly state the proposal (that Nancy thinks eating should be allowed in class), but she implicitly communicates this by explaining that the letter-writer is complaining about food not being allowed in class, and she also includes the reasons why the person who wrote the letter thinks this is bad (“can’t concentrate when you’re hungry” and “you can’t you know like do the end-of-semester parties”) . She then clearly states that the student in the conversation disagrees, along with his reasons for disagreeing. Some of the phrases the speaker uses sound a bit unnatural due to her use of prepositions (for example, she says, “not allowed at the classes,” instead of “not allowed in the classes” and “not necessarily in the crucial” instead of “not necessarily crucial”), but these errors do not make the response difficult to understand. The speaker makes good use of time and uses intonation effectively in order to emphasize certain points (for example, her emphasis on “pretty” when she says, “the classes tend to be pretty long”) . Sample 2 Transcript: The main point that I read in this letter was the student was complaining about the, um, that the food is not allowed at the classes because the classes tend to be pretty long and the people can, like students can be hungry and this is like, prevents concentration, you can’t concentrate when you’re hungry and the other opinion that you can’t you know like do the end-of-semester parties but the student at the conversation, I, is against it, uh, because, um, for the one person who’s eating it helps to concentrate, but for the other who hear like this munching and chewing sound it can be pretty distracting and I do agree with this. Um, and the classes that are at the end of the semester are very important so those parties are not necessarily in the crucial at the end of the year so that’s like those two guys’, students’ opinion.
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