"Provide evidence from text" - question format (1 Viewer)

[andreismolnikov]

Hello,

At the moment I am studying Russian Continuers in year 11 for HSC in 2015. Today, we were doing a practice exam, with one of the questions (a response in English was required) being "What is the dentists' opinions on using chewing gum? Provide evidence from the text."
My teacher for Russian was surprised that I used a direct quote when answering the question, and was even more surprised when she found out that this was the way we were taught in English to answer such questions. She said that using direct quotes were not necessary for questions like this.

My question to you people is the following:

Firstly, how were you taught in English to answer questions which ask you to provide evidence from the text, and secondly, if any of you actually studied a language for Preliminary or HSC, how did you approach such questions?

For obvious reasons, I would like to know the proper way to answer these questions, lest my teacher is wrong and I find myself in the situation of losing marks for not quoting, which is definitely what would happen if the question was in an English exam.

Thanks,
Andrei

 

[strawberrye]

Although I didn't studied a language in my senior years, for English, I was always taught to extract relevant quotes from the particular text I was analysing and analyse these quotes with techniques and effects relevant to answering the question.

 

[I97]

I do Serbian continuers and when answering in English i still quote it in the language it was written, so Serbian. You can even translate the quote back into English. I would always still use direct quotes and explain/elaborate on them as they are the best way to make a reference/ form of evidence from the text, particularly for short answer questions where they mostly are found.