Two candidates, one listening task, opposite profiles
A listening item plays a 90-second announcement at a Bulgarian railway station in Spanish. Two candidates hear it once. Candidate A has strong vocabulary but panics at the fast opening and stops attending for 15 seconds; she catches only «andén» and «retraso». Candidate B understands less vocabulary overall but keeps listening, notes the numbers 14:30, platform 3, and «se ruega» without decoding every word. The item asks: what should passengers do, and what changed? The recording says the 14:30 train to Sofía will leave from platform 3 instead of platform 5, is delayed 20 minutes, and passengers should keep their tickets ready. The teacher must decide how to coach each candidate before the second listening.
1. Diagnose why Candidate A failed despite superior vocabulary, and name the listening sub-skill she needs to practise.
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Candidate A's problem is not lexical but attentional: she abandoned the stream after a fast segment, so she never reached the information-carrying part. This is a breakdown in top-down monitoring and in tolerance of ambiguity - the ability to let an unknown chunk pass and re-enter at the next anchor. She needs practice in 'gist-first' listening: listening for discourse markers («sin embargo», «a partir de», «se ruega») and numbers rather than decoding every word. Vocabulary knowledge cannot compensate if attention is withdrawn; the sub-skill is maintaining the listening set and recovering after a comprehension gap.
2. Explain how Candidate B succeeded with weaker vocabulary, and what risk her strategy carries.
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Candidate B used selective, schema-driven listening: station announcements follow a predictable frame (time, destination, platform, instruction), so she monitored for slots rather than full sentences, and she recorded numbers and the impersonal «se ruega» as an instruction cue. The risk is that slot-filling without full decoding can invert meaning: «en lugar del andén 5» and «el andén 5» sound similar, and a candidate who only hears 'platform 5' may answer with the old platform. She must be trained to listen specifically for contrast markers («en lugar de», «en vez de») that signal a change.
3. The correct answer is: go to platform 3, expect a 20-minute delay, and have tickets ready. Justify why both candidates should hear the recording a second time, and what each should focus on.
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A second listening is justified because the task is transactional and the first pass served different functions for each candidate. Candidate A should use the second pass to re-enter at the first number (14:30) and track forward, ignoring unknown words; her goal is to confirm the instruction verb. Candidate B should use it to verify the contrast: she must check whether platform 3 replaced 5, not the reverse, and confirm that 20 minutes modifies the delay, not the platform. Both should then check that 'tickets ready' is an instruction («se ruega» + infinitive), not a statement of fact. The item tests integrated comprehension, so accuracy on the change is the discriminating point.