Preparing students for writing essay with reasoning elements in english in the unified state exam in Russia

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the study and analysis of the examination task in the written part of the Russian Unified State Examination. It is called an essay or a written statement with reasoning elements and has been being conducted in the Russian Federation since 2005. The aim of the paper is to work out a self-study algorithm helping examinees to complete task 40 (a written statement with reasoning elements) in the Unified State Examination format successfully. The author of the article paid much attention to the study of the history, aim, structure, and statistical results of the exam in the English language in 2019. The transformation of task 40 in the written part of Unified State Examination into the task with the possibility for an exam participant to choose one of two statements is considered and the peculiarities of this task are thoroughly described. The structure of task 40, assessment criteria, subject matter, language material (syntax, morphology, vocabulary, phonetics), typical mistakes are studied and analyzed. The Demo version of an essay 2020 is presented and analyzed in the paper. The work is based on the data of the Federal Service for Supervision of Education and Science of the Russian Federation.