In this post I’m going to talk about the new dictation task in the GCSE, and why i think it has the potential to be very powerful. I was inspired by my year 11 German group, so these examples are going to be in German, but I’ve translated them and where relevant, told you how the words would sound. Our mocks started last week, and in our last lesson before mocks I felt it was important to work on the dictation task ahead of their listening exam. I have a sense that the new listening exam has been made much easier than the previous incarnation of the GCSE, which has a number of consequences. One of them is that the dictation task at the end of the exam, which carries 8 marks at foundation and 10 marks at higher, will become a key discriminator between grades. In a lot of ways it’s one of the hardest elements in the exam to gain full marks on, so it was time to give it some serious attention. I used the end-of-theme dictation tests out of our textbook (the OUP / Kerboodle one...