Taking the Spanish DELE C2 exam - Part 3 - Listening Comprehension

[s_allard]

The second phase of the DELE C2, listening comprehension, was very straightforward but with a major complication. As expected, it consisted of three short recordings followed by a series of questions. A voice explains how the test will work. You are given a minute to read the various statements that make up the questions. Then the recording is played twice followed by a very short time to indicate your answers on the answer sheet.

The first two recordings consist of a conversation between a man and a woman on a certain topic. You then identify which statements correspond to which person or to neither. The difficulty here of course lies in the fact that you have interpret how the statements match what the person said. The statements are not direct quotes.

The third recording was an interview with a female Spanish journalist. Here you had to identify a number of correct statements,

The major complication I mentioned earlier was the quality of the recording. First of all, the speakers were very fast, like really fast native speed. But this wasn't the problem. We always find that native speakers are speaking fast when we don't understand them. When I saw that a computer was being used for this test, I asked to move close to the computer speakers. But it was pointed out to me that the speaker to be used was in the ceiling above where I was setting. I then realized that I had been so used to listening to Spanish recordings with headphones that I hardly ever listened over speakers. I found the recordings hard to understand because the words were sometimes hard to hear.

Then one of the female speakers had in my opinion a strong continental Spanish accent. If the recordings had been Mexican, I don't think I would have had any problems. I don't want to generalize but I do believe that the exam has a strong bias towards things Spanish. For those who are preparing for the DELE C2, make sure you listen to various accents but with emphasis on those from Spain.

[Axon]

Great point about being used to listening with headphones. I imagine most of us rarely hear our L2s from computer or radio speakers. The only time I do is in the car with the radio, and that's not even the same as listening from a boombox or laptop speakers in a test environment.

Something I've done in the past is use Audacity to speed up a podcast by 10% and add in a little static in the background. This definitely increased the difficulty of comprehension, but I admit I didn't follow through with this practice method very much to see what the effects were. Maybe it could be useful for people who live with others and don't want to bother them with L2 coming out of the speakers all the time.

[smallwhite]

Thanks for telling us about the Listening Comprehension part.

Taking the Spanish DELE C2 exam - Part 1 - Overview
Taking the Spanish DELE C2 exam - Part 2 - Reading Comprehension
Taking the Spanish DELE C2 exam - Part 3 - Listening Comprehension
Taking the Spanish DELE C2 exam - Part 4 - Written production
Taking the Spanish DELE C2 exam - Part 5 - Spoken production
Taking the Spanish DELE C2 exam - Part 6 - Final thoughts
Taking the Spanish DELE C2 exam - Part 6 - Results

[tastyonions]

This is at least the second time I've heard about poor quality audio being part of the difficulty of a CEFR test. I sometimes have a hard time deciphering announcements from overhead speakers even in English...