Answers and Discussion
Look at the discussion below of the points raised by the Part 2 task. What would you recommend to your students as the most efficient strategies for dealing with this task?
- What did you do in the pause before listening to the text?
There is a pause of 45 seconds before you hear the recording. During this time, you should read the instructions and the multiple-choice questions on the page, thinking about the overall context that was set up in the instructions. You don't have enough time to read all three options for each question and think about them in detail. A better strategy is to focus on the question stem so that you know why you are listening and what information is going to be relevant to that, and then underline key words in the options that signal what to listen for.
- How did you use the task to help you with the answers?
The instructions give you information about the topic, context and speakers in the text, e.g. a conversation between two colleagues, Mark and Julia, about a seminar on Intellectual Property (IP) Rights which Julia has attended. This will help you make sense of the question stems, e.g. Question 8. ‘According to the seminar speaker, an IP valuation is most often requested when….’ If you have read the instructions, you already know that Julia has attended a seminar on IP, and so you can focus on the key part of the question, which is related to when an IP valuation is most often requested.
The questions follow the order of information in the text and so help you to see how the text is structured. This gives you a framework for what you will hear, giving you the opportunity to predict the answers to some extent, and listen out for discourse markers that tell you when the part of the text relating to each question begins and ends. In this example, it is Mark's questions that usually signal this shift of focus in both the discussion and the questions.
- What was the focus of the questions?
Most of the questions in this Part 2 focus on detailed information in the text, and this information is important as Mark is debriefing Julia after the seminar.
- How did you decide which option to choose?
Information in this kind of text is often paraphrased in the multiple-choice questions. For instance, Question 9: ‘According to the seminar speaker, what tends to be the attitude of financiers to companies with IP assets?’ In order to select the correct option, you need to look for the words which summarise or paraphrase the ideas expressed in the listening text. E.g. Julia says: ‘they do tend to charge an additional amount to do a more searching audit’, which matches Option C ‘They carry out more thorough checks before lending to them.’ Julia says:’ ….finance providers will lend whatever amount is required….’ so Option B is wrong, and Option A is wrong because ‘…to charge an additional amount’ is not connected to interest rates on loans.
- What did you do after the first listening?
There is a pause after the first listening, in which you should check your answers carefully and re-read any questions which you couldn't answer the first time.
- What did you do during the second listening?
As you are listening to the text for the second time, check that your answers are correct and answer any questions you missed in the first listening.