What happens when a candidate makes a grammatical mistake in their answer? Do they get any marks?
A. At Starters level we don’t expect candidates to produce sentences: responses are more likely to be simple, short phrases – most of the time the language produced by a Starters candidate isn’t developed enough for grammatical mistakes to be noticeable! The construction of the Starters Speaking test and the way it is marked reflects our expectation that the language produced will be simple: candidates don’t need to produce answers of more than one or two words in length, and it is enough for these answers to be clear and appropriate for them to meet the marking criteria.
