Junior Cert off to a good start

THE film, Dances with Wolves, cartoon brat Dennis the Menace and an autobiographical passage by Edna O'Brien featured in yesterday's Junior Cert English papers. The consensus was that students at all levels - foundation, ordinary and higher - got off to "a good beginning". Although the students were generally satisfied, teachers were disappointed on some aspects. Ms Fiona de Buis, an English teacher at Waterville Vocational School in Co Kerry, says that the papers were "quite predictable". They showed "a remarkable absence of colour pictures, particularly in media questions. I think that does make a difference to the student. It's very much a basic element of media production, in particular the higher course.

On the higher level, she says that Fergal Keane's piece about the birth of his son was "a good passage".

The foundation level was "okay", said Ms de Buis, although she found the format was "not very attractive. It was a bit dull looking." The question on media studies was "a little terse and maybe a little too demanding because there was too much for students at that level to read". She found that the line about "silken fibres" in Patrick Kavanagh's poem, Beech Tree, "a bit confusing" because it was "again a vocabulary that is a bit beyond foundation level students". At ordinary level, students, she felt would be "happy with it".

Mr Pat Larkin, an English teacher at St Joseph of Cluny Secondary School in Killiney, Co Dublin, and a spokesman for the Teachers' Association for Media Education, was pleased with the higher level paper. "It showed that an imaginative approach has been developed," he says. The media studies section gave students "an opportunity to analyse the power and effect of humour through the print media". He believes this is "a welcome change from advertising and serious newspaper articles" which have been used in the past. This question provided "a good opportunity to link the somewhat frivolous comic strip - Dennis the Menace - with Martyn Turner's characterisations" and "the perceptive and imaginative students" could write with ease and gain valuable marks here.

The other questions on the higher level in paper I were "good probing questions", said Mr Larkin. "On balance it is a paper that does encourage creative talents."

The functional writing questions in the ordinary-level paper, which asked students to write a review of a television drama series or to answer a problem letter, were "relevant and interesting for students of that age group".

In the media studies section on the ordinary-level paper, the use of a picture of Enya in a newspaper cutting "helped students to focus in on what they were saying".

Ms Kate O'Carroll, chairwoman of the Association of Teachers of English, said the unseen poem on the higher-level paper II was "particularly challenging and really probably more suited to the kind of unseen work one would expect to find on a Leaving Cert paper". She also felt that "even an explanation of the title of the poem, Atlas, which was not glossed on the paper at all, was another difficulty that students had to work their way through".

Ms Sinead Connolly, an English teacher at Sallynoggin Senior College, Dublin, also said that her adult and VTOS students "did not like the poetry on the higher-level paper. They were very happy with everything else.

Ms de Buis was concerned by "the whole tone" of the poetry section on the higher-level paper. Students, she said, found it "too sophisticated" and were "just mesmerised by it".

In general, "there was plenty of room for personal interpretation" on the higher level paper," said Mr Larkin.