How The O Level English Paper Will Change From 2023

The English O Level paper in Singapore will be undergoing some changes, which will take place starting from the exams this year. This means that this year’s Express students in Sec 4 will be the first batch to take the exam in its revised format.

Most likely, your teachers and tutors will adjust the way they teach and shift the focus to parts of the exam that have become more important. For students who will be taking the new examination, it will also be useful to understand the changes in syllabus so that you don’t get confused when you do practice papers from previous years.

Let’s take a closer look at what’s changing in the 2022 O Level English syllabus to 2023 syllabus!

Comprehension Section A

There will be 2 sources instead of 1

This 5-mark section will now be shared amongst 2 texts, one of which will be a visual stimuli. Some of the questions will be based on both texts, including some which may be multiple-choice type questions as seen below.

While this section is only worth 5 marks, having two texts now instead of one will require students to put in a little more time and attention to understand and compare both texts. We also see this happening in the GP A Level paper syllabus change, where there are now 3 comprehension texts and more emphasis on evaluating and comparison questions.

Although not officially stated, based on observations of past year papers and the specimen paper, it also seems that the trend going forward will be for more diverse (or ‘modern’) type of visual stimuli, especially online media like social media posts.

Listening comprehension

The note-taking section will increase from 6 to 8 marks

The last section of the listening comprehension test is usually the note-taking section. It will be increased to 8 marks, while the total marks for the first section – which contains a variety of listening tasks – will be reduced to 22 marks.

We suspect that this change in marks allocation also signals an increase in difficulty for the note-taking section, so students need to pay more attention to this section.

Oral communication

The reading aloud section will be removed

In a monumental change for the O Level English syllabus, the reading aloud section of the oral communication exam will be removed. We can guess that MOE and SEAB decided there are far more important things to evaluate students on than their ability to read text aloud – which really isn’t that critical unless you are a newscaster or audio book reader, anyway.

This section will instead be replaced by a new section in the oral exam, the planned response section.

A new planned response section will be added

The new section in the oral communication exam begins with the student being shown a video clip and a prompt. Students have some time to plan their response, similar to a short speech.

From this response, which should not be longer than 2 minutes, examiners will be looking at candidates’ ability to “present their ideas and opinions fluently and effectively to engage the listener” (quoted from the Singapore-Cambridge GCE O Level English Syllabus 1184).

The spoken interaction section remains largely unchanged – and it is likely to be thematically linked to the planned response section. Each section will be worth 15 marks.

Paper 1

Hint of more argumentative essay types

While the syllabus gives examples of narratives and argumentative essays as possible essay types, in reality we don’t see any narratives in the specimen paper. Instead, there are more argumentative, exposition, personal reflective, and personal recounts questions.

With only 4 options to choose from, you can’t count on every year having the whole spectrum of essay types. As such, we suggest that students be familiar with a few of these formats and not rely on only one or two types – especially narratives, which seem to be falling out of favour in recent years.

Conclusion

With the tweaks made to the O Level English paper, we can deduce what types of skills the examining board and MOE are shifting their focus to. A lot of it involves more evaluative and critical thinking skills, which are higher order thinking skills that are included in MOE’s 21^st Century Competencies.

But there’s nothing to worry about if you are affected by the changes! Our tutors here at Future Academy’s Sec 4 English Tuition classes will do their best to prepare students for this new exam syllabus, building up these skills inside and outside of the exam context to help students truly be a master of the language. We’ll be doing the same in our A Level GP tuition classes too. After all, we don’t want to produce students who can only score well in exams but are unable to use English effectively in their daily and professional lives.

Drop us a call today to schedule your lesson with us!