Inecuaciones lineales

: 1) Competent 2) Poor and 3) Incoherent.

CANDLES

The days of the future stand before us like a line of burning candles – golden candles, warm with life.

Behind them stand the days of our past, a pitiful row of candles extinguished, the nearest still sending up their smoke: cold and melted, withered sticks.

I don’t want to look; their image makes me sad, it saddens me to recall their kindling.

I look ahead at the ones still burning. I don’t want to turn and see, with horror, how quickly the line of shadow lengthens,

how quickly the number of snuffed candles grows.

C.P Cavafy (1863-1933)

Competent sample:

I’m going to write about the poem which talks about a candle briefly i will explain what it is about and what these candles are compared to.

I could say that this poem is compared or is relevant to a person’s past, and it seems like this writer is not happy about the past and he has never make peace with the past, maybe his life was good as it is said on the poem that it is horror.

There were things that he cannot manage to look at because he believes that they are snuffed candles that grows, he is looking forward to those that are still burning, which means he is focusing on his bright future.

All I’m saying is let’s make peace with our past because it determines our destiny and future let us not be afraid of our history because past is always with us. let us be brave and face our past.

140 Interestingly, out of the sixty learners who wrote the pre-intervention essay, this learner was the only person who started her essay by using ‘directives’ (i.e. she tells her reader what she is going to do in the body of the essay (for a discussion of directives see Hyland 2005). It is interesting to consider the possibility that the use of directives presages the academic competence (relative to the group) of the rest of this learner’s essay, as directives are usually indicative of agency (Hyland 2005), as well as foresight and planning.

In the second paragraph of the essay, the learner identifies (albeit clumsily) one of the poem’s main themes (“it seems like the writer is not happy about the past he has never make peace with the past”) and then provides a quotation (“it is said on the poem that it is horror”) to establish the particular part of the poem that supports her thematic interpretation of the text. This section of the learner’s essay is important for a number of other reasons. Firstly, the learner’s use of the word “writer” shows a conscious effort to align her essay with the views of the writer. Although such a stance seems to be a self- evident requirement for text-orientated academic writing, virtually none of the learners (in both groups) made an effort to refer their clams back to the writer’s point of view. Secondly, the learner’s use of the HOT word ‘seems’ displays an underlying sensitivity to the interpretative or provisional nature of her essay. Considered in conjunction with the directives used at the start of the essay, this semantic evidence seems to suggest that fairly basic and domain-specific writing skills (that can often be reduced to single words like ‘seems’ and ‘writer’) index base-line levels of academic literacy.

The essay’s third paragraph contains a good example of the quoting tendency identified and discussed at length in the preceding section (i.e. the tendency to not cleanly differentiate between paraphrased and quoted information). Thus, when the learner states “There were things that he cannot manage to look at because he believes that they are snuffed candles that grows […]” there are signs of paraphrasing (i.e. ‘he cannot manage to look’ for the text’s original phrase of ‘I don’t want to turn and see’) as well as instances of unacknowledged quotations (“snuffed candles” and “grows”).

141 Importantly, in this sentence, the quotes have not been placed in inverted commas, and so appear to be continuous with the paraphrased parts of the sentence. On the basis of this sentence, it appears that for this learner – as indeed with all the learners in both groups – there is no realisation that quotes can be used to supply direct evidence for a particular claim. Instead, quotations are conceptualised as primarily descriptive mechanisms that serve the same function as paraphrasing.

In the essay’s closing paragraph, the learner displays some rudimentary conclusion writing skills (something which none of the other learners achieved). Specifically, certain injunctive phrases that the learner deploys (e.g. “let’s make peace with our past because it determines our destiny and future” and “let us not be afraid of our history because past is always with us”) provide evidence that she is adopting a normative, argumentative perspective. Put more simply, she is making an effort to convince her reader that her interpretation of the poem is correct.

This learner’s essay makes no effort to discuss the text itself and so typifies one of the most common tendencies discussed in the previous section. Although the learner does mention ‘candles’ and the ‘future’ (two things of central importance in the poem), these

Poor sample:

In the past our grandmother and gran farther did not have the opportunity to get education. Because of the unequal right and because of their skin colour. They lived a painful life. The opportunity came in 1994 were we all treated equal. In our generation we are living in a better future which light like a burning candle. But our education is in our hand the future depends on us. In other country they deeply want this opportunity but because of sending up their smoke and they are in the dark they could not have opportunity.

Now we have people that care about us and want us to get success and kindling future. This education could do many things in our lives *like reduce the number of uneducated children and unemployment in our country. But they are people who are send by god who want quickly number of snuffed candles grows in this country.

The candles that will make us to have future is Education. You don’t have to have money so that you can be Educated but if you work hard everything is possible for your future.

142 images are harnessed to highly subjective interpretations of the poem (connected to apartheid, unemployment, education, etc.) that clearly have their origins in the learner’s own experiences and concerns (rather than the text). As with nearly all the essays in this category, there appear to be no glaring deficits in the learner’s ability to write in English – in fact, in many ways, the learner’s vocabulary and grammar is as good as the learner who wrote the previous essay.

This essay has been categorised as incoherent because – although it does contain some sentences that manage to awkwardly convey coherent information (e.g. “Behind of us stand the day of our life like a sad candle row”) – it is also littered with sentences that do not make any sense at all (e.g. “The candle show that how long time we stay alive and the is no time to waste and we have no right to stand like”; “I didn’t want to see the horror things like people fright about the money and it is not allowed when you see the thing like pitiful”)

Interestingly, in terms of the number of learners who produced such essays, this essay category is far smaller than the two categories previously considered. This suggests that – in both experimental groups – only a very small portion of the learners’ inability to write academically can be attributed to fundamental issues with the writing and comprehension of English.

Incoherent sample:

The poems is telling us about that. we have a future life that be stand in our life. The day that we gone stay alive in long period and it is a row of candles that a burning. Behind of us stand the day of our life like a sad candle row.

The candle show that how long time we stay alive and the is no time to waste and we have no right to stand like. I didn’t want to see the horror things like people fright about the money and it is not allowed when you see the thing like pitiful.

143