The General Paper aims to test both students’ maturity of
thought as well as linguistic competence. The Application
Question, a reading-to-write component on the Comprehension
Paper, demands more than the mere comprehension of texts. It
assesses students’ critical thinking and reasoning ability, as
well as requires students to produce fluent and cogent written
responses. Students are required to draw arguments from the
stimulus passages, re-present them through paraphrase, then
analyze and discuss them with insight.
Hence, it is clear that the paper demands much more than mere
comprehension of the text(s). Students are required to evaluate
arguments for their validity and relevance, synthesize ideas,
make observations of patterns and relationships, as proof of
their understanding.
The student writing samples will be examined for textual
features and linguistic devices associated with presenting and
negotiating a single voice amongst a multiplicity of views, and
the constructing of an acceptable identity and appropriate
reader-writer relations in line with academic writing
conventions. The analysis draws on Halliday's tripartite system
of overarching and overlapping metafunctions - the ideational,
the interpersonal, and the textual - in the analysis of better
and poorer samples of students’ written work.
