Responding to a listening text with conflicting speakers
Students listen twice to a Tamil radio discussion about a coastal development project. A government official says the project will create 300 jobs within two years. A fisher representative says the same project will displace about 40 families and that the promised jobs are seasonal. A third speaker, an academic, says the environmental impact report is incomplete. Students must write a short Tamil summary of the differing views and then state which claim they find best supported, giving a reason. One student's summary presents the 300 jobs as a fact and omits the displacement figure. Another writes that the fisher representative is 'emotional and unreliable' instead of summarizing her argument.
1. Evaluate the first student's summary against the task requirements and explain what is missing.
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The summary fails because it reports one speaker's projection as established fact and drops the opposing evidence. The 300 jobs figure is a claim made by the official about the future, not a verified outcome, so presenting it as fact misrepresents the source. Omitting the displacement of about 40 families removes the central disagreement the task asks students to summarize. The task requires the differing views, so a summary that includes only one side is incomplete regardless of its Tamil accuracy. A better summary would attribute each claim to its speaker and mark the job figure as a projection, then note the displacement and the academic's point about the incomplete report.
2. The second student dismisses a speaker as 'emotional and unreliable'. Explain why this fails the task and how the student should instead reach a supported judgement.
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The task asks for a summary of views and a reasoned judgement, not an assessment of personality. Labelling the fisher representative emotional substitutes a character judgement for engagement with her argument, and it gives no evidence about whether her claims are accurate. It also risks bias, since the same standard is not applied to the official. To reach a supported judgement, the student should compare the claims on their merits: the displacement figure is a concrete, checkable assertion about identifiable families, while the jobs figure is a projection with a timeframe. The student could reasonably say the displacement claim is better supported because it concerns an observable present effect, while noting that neither claim can be fully verified from the broadcast alone. The reason must rest on the evidence, not on the speaker's manner.