I finally got round to doing the mock listening test and.... well.. oh dear.... 48% Not good at all. Now I'm not so sure I want to sit the exam in the near future. Fixing up listening and writing in a short space of time just feels too arduous, I'd prefer to move things along more organically and think about the exam again once I'm a bit closer. But then again, this could just be morning after depression talking. I probably need to analyse a bit more what went wrong and how to fix things up. Being an exam it's not all about pure listening ability, although of course that is a pretty key thing.
There were three parts, my thoughts are as follows.
1) An interview, whilst not 100% comfortable I felt I followed it pretty well. However, I scored badly. In this section there are a bunch of statements where you have to fill in the blanks, no multiple choice, you have to write the correct word or phrase. Two of the correct answers were words I'd never heard of, so I was already down to a maximum score of 75%. In fact one of them I did correctly identify and hear, but I just wrote it down as I thought it sounded and of course the spelling was wrong. Given there were eight questions it was just too much to listen out for the key bits of info needed, you needed to understand and remember everything.
2) Here were two separate interviews, again not 100% comfortable but I felt I followed them pretty well. Given that there were only four questions for each, it was possible to listen out for the key info. As a result my score was pretty good here, I only dropped one mark.
3) This was part of a play. This was a little harder in terms of listening as the pace was higher, but overall it didn't feel too hard. If it's not a tautology to say this, it was the questions that threw me for 6. You are asked questions relating to the two different characters, but I couldn't work out who was who. There were names in the questions, but there were no names in the audio. Thinking about this in the cold light of day, if I'd stayed calm I could have reasoned out at least some of the answers despite it not being obvious which questions referred to whom. Two of the questions ask about the author's attitude to each of the characters. I'm pretty certain these are impossible to answer. I later read the text for the audio, and I just don't see how this is possible to answer (it was just two guys bartering with no narration). Anyway this part was brutal, perhaps if I'd kept my cool and concentrated more on what was being said, rather than trying to work out who was who, things would have gone better. (Again I read the text after, and it's impossible to know who is who).
I came away with feeling that parts 1 and 3 weren't really a fair listening test, and that those parts were made harder but in ways that don't relate to listening ability. But perhaps that is a cop out, if one's listening is really good, less brain power is used up on deciphering speech freeing up capacity for higher level tasks... perhaps, hard to judge from here.
I wasn't expecting a great result however I'm still going to sulk for a bit.....
