What are the new GCSE listening papers like? Notes from an intermediate listener
French is my first foreign language and some time ago I went through the French Higher listening paper noting the nature of the questions, the traps, and trying to second-guess the reasoning behind the question-setting. Today I have done the same with the Spanish paper. I took my Spanish GCSE in 2012 the summer before I began my teacher training, as I thought it would make me more employable. Since then I’ve occasionally had to teach Spanish as far as year 9, and I have done my best to chat in Spanish with Spanish colleagues. I dropped three marks on this paper. That means my experience isn’t quite that of a year 11 taking the paper, but I certainly didn’t make perfect sense of it.
(An aside. I have been in touch with AQA to ask if I can get involved in some way with the listening papers but have drawn a complete blank. My back-and-forth correspondence with them was almost kafkaesque, which is a pity because I feel I would have some contributions of value. But that’s for another time!)
In this blog I’ll talk about two things: firstly the nature of the paper and the sorts of questions they’re setting, and secondly what that might mean for our classroom practice. I’m interested in the differences in my perspective between the French paper and the Spanish paper - I’d love for a fluent Spanish speaker with intermediate French to do it too!
Preparation time
The first thing to note is the five minutes’ reading time. I fudged this. I had it playing, I was making a cup of tea, opening my notes document, and then I got to reading. I got through the first three or four questions only. And it stressed me out. I began to do what I have been advising my students to do for years - write key words, think of synonyms, etc, but actually I now wonder if that’s useful advice because I wouldn’t have had time. Better would have been to properly read the INSTRUCTIONS! I still get thrown by the questions that are (say) A, B or A&B.
The other key thing I picked up on (you’re probably reading and saying yeah yeah, what do you mean you only just realised this) is that the numbering of the questions is related to the gaps between the passages. I was thrown in the very first pair of questions. It looked like this:
I thought I had three of the four and had drawn a complete blank on what on earth the last bit was (the negative for number 2), when the beep went and the nice lady said ‘number 2’.
Learning point
Basic ‘how to work the paper’ lessons are crucial. Your students need to properly understand the mechanics of the test. But I wonder whether a second beep or an announcement ‘end of question 1’ would be helpful and reduce cognitive load.
Segmentation and vocabulary
Most of the time with the Spanish I could segment what I heard OK, which meant that for me, where I struggled it was largely a question of vocabulary. We have been talking to year 9s about options in the last few weeks, and one of the things we say is how much learning Romance languages will boost your higher level English vocabulary. This struck home with the Spanish listening: there were quite a few incidences of formal register English-Spanish cognates throughout the text. There’s the potential for a lovely virtuous circle to get going here with these sorts of words.
Learning point
is it worth getting students to begin to make a list of these more formal-register English words and their Romance-language cognates? After a certain length of time it might even be possible to share these with the English department so that the learning in languages is reinforced in English, and vice versa.
Keep concentrating
This question was tough. The use of the word ‘yard’ threw me as it felt so American. In the passage, the words ‘jardin’ and ‘mañana’ were present, so if students didn’t know esta a la sombra (I didn’t but I could guess!), they might well have chosen A. The Spanish word referring to the English ‘yard’ was ‘patio’. The subsequent questions related to this collection of passages were equally challenging, with ‘construir una piscina es muy caro’, asking students to infer that the pool was not going to be built, but also penalising anyone who doesn’t keep listening right til the end.
BUT in question 21.2 this bit me on the bum. I had not noticed the question was in two parts, and had lost focus. So I heard ‘por el pueblo’ and chose that as my answer, and I simply hadn’t noticed the allusion to ‘ayuntamiento’.
Learning point
keep your wits about you. Don’t second-guess and be really careful not to form impressions before you have heard the ALL passage. Interestingly in my doctoral research I found that a lot of students DO lose focus before the end, so strategies might need to be explored as to how to keep engaged.
Iterative listening - buttercups and buttocks
Then there was a collection of passages about a celebrity and their various adventures. In it I noticed that I was self-subtitling a little bit, and not always accurate. The word ‘vimos’ threw me - I heard ‘Bimos’, and because it was at the start of the sentence, I was wondering whether this was a person’s name. It was only with that iterative nature of listening that I got ‘vimos’ a few microseconds later.
Learning point
Tell your students about ‘iterative listening’ - in other words, that sometimes your understanding of what you hear changes as you continue to listen. My favourite example of this is ‘I stooped to pick a buttercup. What a buttock was doing there I don’t know.’ Make it really explicit to students that this is a thing and this is why they need to keep listening.
Details details
We have talked about how sometimes the mark scheme doesn’t give the student the point because they don’t give ALL the details that are in the passage. This worried me in the series of passages about the celebrity. In the question ‘what are they going to do next summer’, the text said van a casarse el próximo verano. Quieren una boda sencilla. I got ‘they are going to get married.’ but I had no idea about una boda sencilla, and I didn’t know whether I’d got enough of the information to get the point (turns out I had).
Learning point for teachers
Perhaps the new GCSE listenings are going to be a bit less pernickity about getting EVERYTHING? We can but hope. Let’s all watch this really carefully.
Voiced and unvoiced pairs
Voiced and unvoiced pairs also threw me on one occasion and this reflects something I also found in my PhD research. What do I mean by this? There are various pairs of letters which sound very similar, but one is more ‘whispery’ than the other. For example ‘t’ is the ‘whispered (unvoiced) equivalent of ‘d’. ‘P’ is the unvoiced equivalent of ‘b’. Et cetera. However (getting technical for a moment) the whisperiness or not isn’t an on or off, it’s a continuum, and there’s quite a lot of academic research to show that speakers of different languages detect the transition from voiced to unvoiced at different points of the continuum.
This totally caught me out on this listening - again in the passage about the celebrity, there was a little ‘I’m a celebrity, get me out of here’ type anecdote where it told me that Juanjo had gone into the woods with other celebs. My notes said ‘in a wood with a lot of ‘boca comida’. I got boca as mouth. I got comida as food. But I still couldn't make sense of what was going on. It was only when I saw the transcript ‘muy poca comida’ that I even realised I had fallen into this trap.
Learning point
This comes back to my regular theme of asking your students what they perceive. Watch out for various confusions that might arise like this (blog incoming for more on this, because I think it’s cool!)
Multi-tasking
I also noticed that reading in English (scanning the question) and listening in Spanish simultaneously challenged my working memory / concentration. This is partly because once the previous passage had finished, I was still making notes, even beyond the ‘beep’, and wasn’t exactly using the time in the way AQA had envisaged it. Some formal listening exams get the candidates to listen to the passage first BEFORE they are given the questions. this would certainly reduce cognitive load and it would be good to know whether the UK exam boards have done any research on the pros and cons of taking this approach. Perhaps those who are doing the Edexcel because of their decision to play the passage three times should tell their students to listen first time with eyes shut, before they look at the questions? It would be an interesting experiment.
Lobbying point
If others have had similar experiences - or if your students have - we should be shouting loudly about this. Two minutes at the very end of the recording to go back and check your answers is pointless. Much much better to give students 20 seconds or so while the passage is still in their echoic memory to puzzle out what they have heard, before the next passage comes along and wipes their short term memory. I think this would be a better reflection on what we know about how listening works. It would also be more ecologically valid - what we know about listening in the real world might well involve a person pressing pause, or asking a speaker to hang on a moment. (In fact this is what happens in the A level, too!)
Listening stamina
Is it a coincidence that the three points I dropped were right at the end of the test? I don’t know whether the questions became increasingly difficult, or whether I was getting mentally tired, but it’s worth watching this as we get more experienced with these new tests. I feel AQA needs to get better with the ‘reject’ column. I didn’t know ‘umos’ with ‘los umos de la fabrica’ and I put ‘smells / emissions’. AQA said the answer was fumes, but accept ‘smoke’. I have no idea whether smells or emissions would have been allowed.
Dictation
A final reflection on the Spanish dictation exercises. This is said with the caveat that I’m very much NOT an expert on Spanish phonology. Within the world of French teaching concerns were voiced at the outset of the introduction of dictation, given the number of silent letters in French, compared with the much more ‘orthographically transparent’ Spanish and German (orthographically transparent means that what you see is what you say’). In the dictation the sentence is played once all the way through, then once with pauses, and then once more all the way through.
As an intermediate Spanish learner at best, I noticed that there were slight differences in pronunciation between the full sentences and the paused sections, particularly the ‘ll’ sound in ‘estaba llena’ – which sounded more like a ‘y’ in the full sentence, and more like a ‘dj’ in the shorter sections. Similarly the word ‘ganaron’ differed between a ‘y’ sound and a much harder ‘g’ sound. I note this just because I wonder whether experienced Spanish teachers might take it for granted. It didn’t throw me – I liked noticing it – but it COULD throw your GCSE learners.
A few concluding remarks
What’s my conclusion, then? From the perspective of both a teacher and a learner, my impression is that this paper is an improvement on the old GCSE, with possibly fewer traps than previously. It’s still not perfect - but what is? I have concerns about the number of multiple choice questions, which would mean that a student could get a large proportion of correct answers at random, but I would hope that the grade boundaries, when we get them, would allow for that. I think we need to wait and see how it all pans out when we start to do these in the classroom, but as always, doing the paper and seeing what your students get is just the starting point. Unpicking ‘why did you choose the answer you did’ - almost forensically - is going to be the way forward with improving listening proficiency.
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