In two weeks from today, the twelfth grade students who enrolled in this year’s Baccalaureate will take the first test: that of communication skills in the Romanian language. Here is a sample topic that students might like.
The Romanian language skills test takes place between January 27-29. Archive
Ruxandra Achim, teacher of the Romanian language at the ILCaragiale National College in Bucharest, explained to “Adevărul” that the test for evaluating communication skills in the Romanian language involves reading aloud a non-literary text at first sight. “In fact, the aim is to understand a certain communication situation. It is about understanding the relationship between the sender, the one who transmits the message, and the receiver, the one who receives the message, with the presentation of the purpose of the communication”.
What students need to know and how to prepare for the exam. A teacher’s advice
In order for a student to obtain an “advanced” or “experienced” qualification, he must first demonstrate that he understands the text he is reading. “It is about a comprehensive reading. This means marking written pauses with the help of commas, marking exclamatory, interrogative, imperative situations. Hence, mindful reading. Then, the student must demonstrate that he knows how to adapt to the particularities of a communication situation: to recognize the particularities of an official text, the particularities of a journalistic text, of a scientific, memorialistic, epistolary text, to be able to extract various ideas, facts, arguments, opinions from the text he has to go through. To be able to justify a point of view in a 10-minute exhibition”.
Children, the teacher also says, should connect to usual communication situations. “This test practically connects them to concrete things. And I think it also depends a lot on the culture and the information they have accumulated so far. They don’t have anything specific to repeat or learn. Instead, they have the obligation to update some knowledge related to these communication contexts, to understand the text. They have to demonstrate that they understand it, that they can answer questions based on that text, that they can argue an idea,” explained teacher Ruxandra Achim.
Baccalaureate 2025. Model for the Romanian language skills test
Read the text aloud.
“With images, as with texts, things are like this: we consume a huge amount of visual and written information every day, which unfolds on the phone or computer screen. It’s a rapid movement that our eyes and brains have become accustomed to over the past decade. There is a restlessness of the “scroll”, which no longer leaves us alone with our thoughts. As if we were wasting time and missing something important.
Obviously, it’s an illusion, like all the ones we get caught up in. Our nervous fingers obsessively seek to touch a screen, to take a photo, but if you take away the object of their desire, they will go through withdrawal, but at some point they will calm down. We live, moreover, in a great paradox, the more connected we are, the more ill-informed we seem to become.
Try to convince someone, who does not have this habit, that the experience of the cinema or reading a novel, which also means putting the phone aside for at least an hour and a half, is important. “Why?”, he will ask you. This simple question, which children ask obsessively. You can only tell, in this case, what you experienced, how it was to enter a cinema hall after a few months.
We can go about our lives, as we already know from the pandemic, without many things that we thought were indispensable. No matter how many movies I had seen on the laptop screen, in the evening, when I played, I dreamed with my mind’s eye how at some point I would sit down on a padded chair at the cinema and wait for the lights to go out and the journey to begin. (…)
Movies and books often tell us about our lives, that’s their power. About dear people, about what we experienced or imagined at a given moment. And that could be one of the possible answers to the very natural question, basically, “why should I go see a movie that isn’t funny?”, for example. And it’s not “entertainment” at all. On the contrary”.
(Ana Maria Sandu, Her lost look, of a helpless child, www.dilemaveche.ro, Dec. 17, 2022)
1. Formulate answers to the questions below, regarding the communication situation in the quoted text.
a. Who could be the recipient of the given text, given the purpose of the communication?
b. Which functional style does the text above belong to? It mentions two formal/content features.
c. What important content elements (ideas, arguments, facts, opinions) do you identify in the given text?
2. What is your opinion on the role of film in today’s world? Justify your answer.
Baccalaureate 2025. Exam calendar, first session
- January 27-29, 2025: Assessment of oral communication skills in Romanian – test A;
- January 29-31, 2025: Assessment of oral communication language skills in the Mother Tongue – test B;
- February 3-5, 2025: Assessment of language skills in a language of international circulation – sample C;
- February 5-7, 2025: Digital skills assessment – sample D;
