Answer keys: more than an afterthought

Answer keys are a vital part of ELT materials, relied on by teachers and learners alike, but probably rarely given a huge amount of thought. A couple of recent writing projects, though, have got me thinking about this undiscussed part of an ELT author's job and what it can sometimes tell you about the rationale behind the materials more generally.

Case 1: tight and unambiguous

On the first project, writing workbook materials to go with a C1 general English book, part of the brief explained that in some of the key target markets for the course, teachers were over-worked and had no time to spend on marking homework. Thus, they wanted workbook material they could assign as extra practice for homework that students could work through and check the answers for themselves. For that reason, all the activities I included should have clear, unambiguous 'correct' answers to go in the AK.

In addition, I was told that some teachers lacked confidence teaching at higher levels, because they were often pushing up against their own language limits, and so didn't want learners coming back to them with questions or potential ambiguities in the workbook. Another reason to keep things tightly keyed.

Of course, this had a significant affect on the kinds of activities I could include. Many areas of language simply aren't black and white, especially once you get to C1 level, and it's really quite hard to construct activities where there's only one possible 'correct' answer without making everything strictly multiple choice. And even if you do opt for multiple choice (in some form), it can sometimes be hard to come up with distractors that look plausible but are clearly incorrect. This was made even trickier by the fact that I was also being pushed to keep the level high and the tasks appropriately challenging!

Case 2: open and productive

The second project was again supplementary materials, this time for B1+, that could either be given as homework or potentially used in class. This time, the instructions were for a proportion (actually set out in the brief as a percentage) of the activities to be productive - with either some leeway in how students answered or completely open. Multiple-choice activities were off limits!

From a pedagogical perspective, this is quite freeing, letting you get away from what can often feel like rather mechanical controlled practice and allowing more freedom for creativity - constructing activities that best fit the language points. It's nice not having to tie yourself up in knots trying to come up with unambiguous answers for everything.

However, it can have its downsides too. When you're creating activities to practise a particular vocab set or grammar point, you still need to construct an activity that guides the learners to use that specific language. And sometimes, multi-choice is really just the most obvious option.

Formats and formatting

Most projects I've worked on as an author (including case 1 above) have asked for simple answer keys, by which I mean if you have the following item in an activity:
1 The cat _____ (sit) on the mat.
... then the answer key would simply read:
1 sat

Sometimes, I've been allowed to give maybe two slashed alternative answers in the key or to give a very brief commentary explaining why one answer (perhaps a distractor or an obvious likely error) is incorrect/unlikely. I've also had instances where "suggested answers" were occasionally allowed - usually for the last activity of a section or for a writing task.

From a practical perspective, when I'm putting together an answer key, I generally use the split screen function in Word, so I can see the activity at the top of the screen and add the answers (generally at the end of the document) at the bottom. 

 

 

 

Project 2 above, with it's requirement for freer, more productive activities not only needed plenty of "suggested" answers, but the answer key was to include the rubrics and the answers shown in context. So, the example above would appear in the answer key as:

Complete the sentences using the past simple of the verb in brackets. 
1 Yesterday, the cat sat (sit) on the mat.

At first glance, this seemed like it'd be a fairly straightforward question of cutting and pasting, and to a degree, it was. However, for someone who finds fiddling mousework painful, it turned out to be especially tough going. I settled into an approach of writing the initial activity with the answers in situ.
1 The cat sat (sit) on the mat.
Then when I was happy with the complete activity, I'd copy that into the AK (at the end of the document), then go back and 'blank out' the answers in the main activity - in fact usually replacing the words with [WOL] (the standard abbreviation for 'write-on line').
1 The cat [WOL] (sit) on the mat.

Simple enough, right? Except that highlighting exactly the word/words to be replaced with [WOL] with your cursor can be quite fiddly, especially where it appears directly before a comma or full-stop (without catching the punctuation mark) or where it's the contracted form of a verb - the cat's sitting on the mat. After a long stretch of grammar activities that included present/past continuous and present/past perfect, I started trying to remember to leave spaces between the subject and contraction to make it easier to highlight ... but when you're thinking and typing at speed, it's actually surprisingly hard to do. Cue much swearing and rubbing of sore hands/wrists!