To assess whether students have understood how to use the narrative skill, a…

Assessment tasks must match the type of skill being tested. A productive skill such as narrative skill — the ability to organise a sequence of events into a coherent story — can only be genuinely assessed by having the learner actually produce a narrative. Tasks that test grammar mechanics or comprehension of someone else's writing assess a different skill altogether, however closely they may appear related.

Asking students to share an incident when they were surprised requires them to select events, sequence them logically, and narrate the outcome in their own words — exactly the skill being assessed. This is a direct, performance-based check of narrative ability.

• Circling verbs and adjectives in a given text tests grammar-identification skill, not the ability to construct a narrative.

• Correcting mistakes in the use of describing words tests editing and proofreading accuracy, not narrative construction.

• Reading a story and answering comprehension-based questions tests understanding of someone else's narrative, not the student's own capacity to produce one.

Hence, only a task that requires students to construct and recount their own sequence of events genuinely assesses narrative skill.