Zinstaak
A short task where you write or complete one sentence to a given instruction — 8 of the 12 tasks on Schrijven I.
Two thirds of Programma I Schrijven is single sentences, not letters. Each one is judged on its own, by two assessors against a marking scheme, so there is no long text to hide a weak sentence inside. The difficulty is not vocabulary — it is that the instruction contains a condition (a reason, a time, a politeness level) and a sentence that omits it scores nothing, however correct its Dutch.
How the exam tests this
12 tasks in 100 minutes: 8 sentence tasks, 2 partial (a short message, a form, a text to supplement) and 2 short (a note, a short letter, a situation). The sentence tasks give a situation in Dutch and ask for one sentence — often to complete a half-written one. Two assessors mark against a scheme, and the scheme asks whether the required elements are present and whether the sentence is grammatically whole. A sentence that answers a different question than the instruction asked is a zero, not a deduction.
What is wrong with this sentence?
Ik kom vrijdag niet naar de les, omdat ik moet naar de tandarts.
Most candidates write it exactly like this and lose the mark without knowing why.
The rest of this lesson
The rule, the worked examples, the exceptions and what to do in the exam room open with Mastery, together with every other lesson for this exam.
See plans