O-Level Chinese Guide 2026 (1160): the 实用文 Email, 口试 and Where the Marks Actually Are

The recipient’s name or title, followed by a colon rather than a comma. 陈老师： for a teacher, 亲爱的美玲： for a friend. Getting the honorific wrong here signals the wrong register for the entire email.

您好！ to someone senior, 你好！ to a peer. One line, on its own. Skipping it is the single most common structural omission.

Two to three paragraphs. Open by stating why you are writing, develop the points the question asks for, then close with what you want to happen next. This is where 内容 marks live.

祝 on one line, then the wish indented on the next: 身体健康 to an elder, 学业进步 to a classmate, 工作顺利 to someone at work. Match the wish to the recipient.

Your relationship then your name: 学生 陈志明 or 你的朋友 美玲. The question tells you who you are — use it rather than inventing a name.

Writing to the wrong person

The scenario names an audience and the register follows from it. A student emailing 校长 who writes 你好 instead of 您好, or signs off 你的朋友, loses 语文与结构 marks before the content is even read.

Treating 150 characters as the target

字数在150以上 is a floor, not a goal. An email that stops at 155 characters rarely has room for 内容有层次 — layered content — which is what separates band 1 from band 2 in the rubric.

Answering only half the prompt

These questions usually carry two or three explicit requirements. Marks for 切合题意 are awarded against all of them, so covering two out of three caps the content band no matter how well written the email is.

Dropping the 祝颂语 or 署名

Both are structural marks under 组织得当、段落分明. They take fifteen seconds to write and are the cheapest marks on the paper to recover.

Copying the stimulus wholesale

When the question supplies an email to reply to, lifting its phrasing back verbatim reads as 重复 in the rubric. Paraphrase, then add the information the reply is actually meant to carry.

Read the mark allocation before you write

Ten questions carry 35 marks, so they are not equally weighted. A 2-mark question wants one clean point; a 5-mark question wants three or four distinct ones. Students who write the same-sized answer for every question systematically underwrite the big ones and waste time on the small ones.

用自己的话 means exactly that

When a question asks you to answer in your own words, copying the sentence out of the passage scores near zero however correct it is. Change the vocabulary and the sentence pattern, keep the meaning. When the question does not say so, quoting is usually safe — but paraphrasing is never penalised.

Word-meaning questions are contextual

词语在文中的意思 asks what the word means here, not what the dictionary says. The answer almost always has to be inferred from the sentences either side of it, and a correct dictionary definition that does not fit the passage is still wrong.

Cause questions are usually scattered

For 为什么 questions, the reasons are rarely in one place. The passage typically gives one cause early and another late, and the mark scheme wants both. Before writing, scan the whole passage for a second reason rather than answering from the first one you find.

概括 questions need coverage, not depth

Summary questions are marked on whether you covered the whole span asked about. One richly explained point from paragraph two will lose to four brief points drawn from across the passage. Work paragraph by paragraph and take one idea from each.

Opinion questions still need textual support

When asked for the author’s view — or your own — an unsupported assertion caps the mark. Name the view, then point to what in the passage produced it. The two passages often take contrasting positions, which is usually what the final questions are built on.