What is the real problem with GCSE Listening?

Note. In this post from 2021, the references to the "new GCSE" may be to what we now call "the old GCSE."

 What exactly am I talking about when I say that the GCSE Listening exam is not a listening at all? Teachers and pupils know it is full of traps. This is true. And it is part of the problem, but it is only one of the features of a truly bizarre exam.

Before we go into detail, it might be useful to make a list of some of the immediately obvious characteristics of GCSE Listening Exams in Languages, in England:

1. All actual Listening cues are removed. It is read aloud. And the actors are asked not to use intonation which might give away some meaning.

2. It is disembodied speech from a sound track, with no face to face engagement or context.

3. Contexts are chosen to be slightly bizarre, so that pupils can't use prediction or deduction in their answers.

4. Synonyms and paraphrase, which in real life can be used to clarify and aid comprehension, are turned on their head and used to require pupils to recognise two ways of saying the same thing in order to get a mark.

5. Discourse markers which might give away too much are often deliberately removed. Resulting in disorientation. Things like "but" in a question asking if a statement is Positive / Negative / Both. Deliberately removed because it would suggest that it was Positive but also Negative without the pupil having to understand every word. We will come back to having to understand every word. And disorientation.

6. There are traps and tricks, so a pupil who knows no Spanish has a better chance of randomly getting right answers than a pupil who knows enough Spanish to regularly fall for the distractor.

Let's look at an example. This is from the 2018 Edexcel Higher Listening. A paper which famously contains this question:

The sound track tells you, and I'm going to give it to you in English, to give you a chance, that: 

When her parents arrived in the States, they couldn't afford a place to rent so they stayed with her uncle until they could get a loan that meant they could get somewhere to live.

Correct answer? You are supposed to know that if you get a loan, this is to... buy a house. Anyone get that? Me neither.

OK, so it's easy to poke fun at particularly badly set questions and people pretending to be "Mexican" but with Spanish pronunciation and Spanish vocabulary. But this isn't a one-off. It is how the exam works.

Here is another question from the same paper that helps us understand what is going on. 

The way this is supposed to work, is that all of the options A - E are mentioned, and the pupil is meant to identify which ones are mentioned in the precise context of "Living with Grandparents."

Unfortunately, the first sentence sets the context of the whole piece as, "Con respeto a vivir con los abuelos" so we are off to a bad start. Pupils will immediately hear "está de moda", link it to the announced context, and happily (and wrongly) tick A. Then they will hear, "Es un problema que exige un cambio de mentalidad" and if they know enough Spanish to do badly in the exam, they will tick B (wrongly).

This gets to the heart of why this is not a listening. Look closely at what is going on with this sentence:

Dado que en los próximos diez años el número de personas mayores de sesenta años se doblará, es un problema que exige un cambio de mentalidad y no rehuir vivir con los mayores.

The sentence does contain the vital clue as to whether this section of the text unlocks the key to the answer, "vivir con los abuelos". Pupils can't catch hold of it early and use it to focus their attention, because it comes at the end of the sentence. And it's in a negative. But its presence in the same sentence would seem to confirm its relevance to the idea that a change of mentality is linked to "vivir con los abuelos." But no. Actually, the idea of "vivir con los abuelos" is not associated with the first part of the sentence. What needs rethinking, is the idea of grandparents being left to live in a home or live alone. 

In a reading, it would be possible to go back and figure this out. You can re-read the first part of the sentence and, if you know all the words and all the grammar, you can eventually work out that the link between change of mentality and living with grand parents is a complicated rhetorical argument that does not directly link the two. But as a listening, the demand on the pupil to hold all the exact wording in their head and go back and reconsider it at the end of the sentence, is not reasonable. If you are listening out for the answers as you go, that is not enough. The passage ties itself in knots, and it will tie you in knots.

In fact, "no rehuir vivir con los mayores" is a signpost to the next sentence and the two points coming up at the end of the passage! But of course that can't be spelled out or made clear. Because this is not a test of what pupils know in the language. The next sentence doesn't acknowledge any link to the previous one, starting with the impenetrable "Al tener tiempo los abuelos..." But this is where the correct answer is to be found. Everything preceding in this passage was to tie the pupil in knots, obliging them to follow word by word, weigh up the relevance of what is said, despite deliberate mis-signposting and removal of genuine signposts.

At this point, reading ahead (I know, it's supposed to be a Listening) and looking at the questions again, I realise that although there are 2 subsequent points about living with grandparents, only one of them is on the list of answers. So in retrospect, "un cambio de mentalidad" which I thought was referring to the idea of leaving grandparents to live alone or in a home, IS in fact being counted as a correct answer for "living with grandparents." Thank goodness I can read it as many times as I need.

I am not actually trying to make a point about traps, but I did just get caught in one. What I want to show is that this is not a listening. It is a reading you have to do in your head. It is a dictation but you don't get to write it down. It depends on you being able to process every word and every grammar nuance. And to be able to hang on to that, in your head, to consider and reconsider its relevance in the light of further information. Word by word. All while deliberate traps and misdirection, delayed information, removed signposts, fake signposts, are happening. As a reading, with annotation and a highlighter, you could figure it out. As a listening, it is tortuous.

But what is Listening, and what are Listening skills? In Europe, Listening is about increasingly being able to deal with real spoken language. Quickly moving towards dealing with normal natural-speed speech. With intonation and tone of voice explicitly present as Listening cues to help deal with what happens when you listen, (at a level below fluent speaker) to a foreign language: You do not understand or process every word. And you learn to deal with that by putting together all the information you have. It is a back and forth of hypothesis and confirmation between the situation, the attitude, the tone of voice, the response, the words you know, the words you can work out.

I have written other posts, for example this one, about Listening to natural speech. I would also like to talk about this authentic fast speed YouTube video. I watched the first minute and a half with my Year 10, and they got all of it. They understood it was a rant. They understood that she used to like to go to the cinema but that it's ruined by noise from the audience. That it can be the best film or the worst film, and she would love to watch it on the big screen and with great sound, but now she would prefer to watch it at home. They told me enthusiastically what they understood. And I didn't try to catch them out. Why would I do that?

Listening to texts read aloud, at slow speed, with intonation deliberately removed, so you can focus on answering questions designed to test word by word processing of passages that tie themselves in knots, is absurd. It has no relation to language-learning. It is an invention of someone obsessed with testing vocabulary and grammar. In a kind of made up language puzzle situation. And if the examiners don't "believe" in Listening skills, why do they go to such lengths to remove all cues and obviate the use of Listening Strategies?

The new GCSE panel say they want to do something about the Listening Exam. By promising slow speech. And by limiting the vocabulary to a list of words that can be learned. Does this solve the problem? Or does it exacerbate the situation where Listening is used to test precise items of grammar and vocabulary, requiring word-by-word processing rather than putting together the clues to make sense of what is being said?