ALPT B1 common mistakes
ALPT B1 · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
On listening tasks, the candidate stops listening after the first plausible answer and writes it down before the audio finishes, missing a later correction or contrast such as 'actually' or 'on second thought'.
Spoken texts often revise or negate information mid-stream, and candidates treat the first matching word as the final answer because they are anxious about losing the thread.
What to do instead
Keep the pen down until the item's audio ends; train with recordings that deliberately contain a self-correction, and note both the first and final statement before choosing.
The candidate matches a single overheard word to an answer option without checking that the whole option fits the meaning of the utterance.
Word-spotting is faster and feels safer than processing full meaning, especially under time pressure, so surface overlap substitutes for comprehension.
What to do instead
Practise paraphrased distractors: for each option, decide which words in the audio would have to be said for it to be true, and reject options that only share vocabulary.
On reading passages, the candidate answers from general knowledge or personal opinion rather than from what the text states.
Familiar topics trigger prior assumptions, and skim-reading leaves gaps that memory fills in with plausible but unsupported content.
What to do instead
For every answer, locate and underline the exact sentence that supports it; if no sentence supports it, mark the option as unsupported and move on.
The candidate runs out of time on a reading section because they read every passage at the same slow pace before looking at the questions.
No strategy for triage, plus rereading sentences after losing the thread, consumes the allotted minutes on early items.
What to do instead
Read the questions first to set a purpose, skim for structure, then read closely only around relevant lines; practise with a timer and a fixed per-passage budget.
The candidate produces sentences with correct words but broken agreement or tense, such as a third-person singular subject with a base-form verb or a past-time adverb with a present-tense verb.
Attention goes to meaning during production, and the endings that carry grammatical information are unstressed and easy to drop.
What to do instead
Do a dedicated editing pass on finished sentences checking subject-verb agreement, tense consistency with time markers, and article and plural endings, one category at a time.
The candidate writes long, embedded sentences that collapse halfway, leaving a clause with no main verb or two main verbs joined without a connector.
Attempting complex structures to sound advanced without control of clause boundaries produces fragments and run-ons.
What to do instead
Limit sentences to one main clause plus at most one subordinate clause; after writing, label each sentence's main verb and split any sentence with more than one unconnected finite verb.
The candidate repeats the same high-frequency general words (good, nice, very, thing, do) instead of a precise word, and misuses near-synonyms that differ in register or collocation.
Limited active vocabulary plus fear of error pushes candidates toward safe generic lexis, and dictionary equivalents are chosen without checking how the word combines.
What to do instead
Build synonym sets with a model collocation for each item and record the register; in practice writing, replace every generic word with a specific one and check the pairing against a collocation reference.
The candidate writes a composition with no clear paragraph structure: an introduction that restates the prompt, body paragraphs mixing several ideas, and no concluding sentence.
Planning is skipped under time pressure, so ideas are written in the order they occur rather than grouped by function.
What to do instead
Spend two minutes on a skeleton: one topic sentence per paragraph, two supporting points, one closing line; write to that skeleton and check each paragraph opens with its topic sentence.
In the speaking task, the candidate answers in one or two words or fills pauses with long silent gaps instead of managing the interaction.
Anxiety about accuracy suppresses output, and there is no rehearsed set of fillers or framing phrases to buy planning time.
What to do instead
Rehearse a small toolkit of openers, linkers and stallers, and practise answering every prompt with a statement plus one reason plus one example, recorded and reviewed.
The candidate's speech is hard to follow because word and sentence stress fall evenly, and individual sounds are distorted enough to force the listener to reconstruct words.
The candidate transfers the rhythm of their first language and has rarely heard their own recorded output, so the problem is unnoticed.
What to do instead
Record short answers, transcribe them, and mark the stressed syllable of content words; shadow short model recordings to align rhythm, and drill the specific problem sounds in minimal pairs.