The new syllabus introduced changes in assessment for his subject in the international examinations. These meant that, for the mocks which preceded those exams, Tony couldn’t do a simple cut-and-paste from past English Language papers as in previous years. He had to prepare something from scratch for his students, with whom he had already analysed, discussed and trialled the specimen paper. He’d had to come up with three unseen passages of similar length across a range of prose genres, and, using the rubric of the specimen paper, set two tasks per passage: Part A, to write a linguistic commentary on…