The Overheard Announcement
A Grade 11 class is practising the multiple-choice listening task. The recording is played twice, as in the real exam. After the first play, Ani marks option B ('the train leaves at 9:15') for the question 'When must passengers arrive at the platform?' After the second play she switches to C ('the train leaves at 9:45'). Her teacher notes that the announcement says: 'The 9:45 service to Gyumri is delayed by twenty minutes. Passengers should be at the platform no later than fifteen minutes before the revised departure time.' The question asks about arrival at the platform, not departure. Ani's written notes show only '9:45' and '20 min'. She has 40 seconds of transfer time left before the next question block begins.
1. Diagnose why Ani's answer changed between plays and identify the exact listening skill she is missing.
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Diagnosis. Ani is listening for numbers rather than for the question's target. Both plays contain time figures (9:45, twenty minutes, fifteen minutes), and she latches onto whichever number she hears last or most prominently.
Missing skill: matching the question stem to the information type in the text. The stem asks 'When must passengers arrive at the platform?' - a derived time, not a stated departure.
Correct reasoning: revised departure = 9:45 + 20 min = 10:05. Platform arrival = 10:05 − 15 min = 9:50.
Her notes ('9:45', '20 min') are insufficient because she never wrote down the fifteen-minute figure or the word 'before'. The fix is a note-taking habit: capture the relation words (before/after/delayed/no later than), not just the digits.
2. Design a 10-minute remediation activity that targets this skill without replaying the same recording, and state how you would check it worked.
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Activity - 'Question first, numbers second.'
- Give students the question stems before any audio, with no options. Ask them to underline the target (a time, a place, a reason, a person).
- Read aloud a short, fresh announcement containing at least three time figures and one relational phrase (e.g. 'boarding closes ten minutes before departure'). Students write only the figure that answers their underlined target.
- Pair-check: each student must justify the answer by quoting the relation word.
Check: repeat with a second short text in which the distractor number is spoken louder/slower than the target number. Success = students ignore the salient distractor and justify with the relation phrase. If they still choose the loud number, the problem is attentional, not linguistic, and needs a different intervention.