The date nobody misheard
Six eight- and nine-year-olds did a Flyers Listening Part 2 practice. They heard this exchange twice:
Man: The school trip to the science museum is on Friday the twelfth. Girl: The twelfth? I thought it was the twentieth. Man: No, the twentieth is the art competition. And remember, tickets are six pounds fifty for adults, but children pay four pounds fifty.
Results: four children wrote '20th' as the date; five wrote '£6.50' as the child's ticket price. Every child spelled 'museum' correctly. Nobody asked for a third hearing. In the follow-up chat all six could say, in their own words, that the trip was to a science museum and that an art competition was also happening. The teacher's instinct is to blame the speed of the recording and to play it a third time.
1. What do the errors actually show the children doing, and why does 'the recording was too fast' fail as an explanation?
Read the worked answer
The errors share one cause, and it is not speed.
Decoding is intact: all six spelled 'museum' correctly, nobody asked for a repeat, and everyone could summarise the content afterwards. The sounds were heard. What failed is attaching each number to the right referent.
- '20th' was heard perfectly. It is simply the wrong date - the recording even rules it out explicitly ('No, the twentieth is the art competition'). The children took the second number without tying it to its noun.
- '£6.50' was also heard. They stopped at the first price that followed the word 'tickets' and did not carry on to 'but children pay four pounds fifty'.
So the strategy on display is local word-matching: find a number near the gap, write it, move on. Blaming speed would lead to slowing the audio, which cannot help, because the text was already understood at word level. The failure is one level up.
2. Design a ten-minute activity that targets this, and justify why it is a better use of time than a third hearing.
Read the worked answer
Referent-sorting, no audio.
Give each pair two cards at a time, e.g.:
- 'Adults - £6.50' / 'Children - £4.50'
- 'Friday 12th - museum trip' / 'Friday 20th - art competition'
Read one sentence aloud; pairs hold up the card that answers a question you asked first ('How much does Sam pay? He is nine.'). They must then say which words in the sentence told them.
Then transfer to new content with the same shape: 'My brother's party is on Saturday. My party is on Sunday - so when is my party?'
Why this beats a third hearing: the children already understand this text; another hearing rehearses one recording, not a skill. The card task forces the exact decision the test demands - which referent does this number belong to - and makes the wrong choice visible and discussable. The transfer round checks whether the habit moved, rather than whether they have memorised this dialogue.
3. A colleague says: 'Simplest fix - tell them that when they hear a number, write it down immediately.' Why is that advice wrong for this class?
Read the worked answer
Because writing the first number they hear is precisely what produced both errors. The instruction trains a reflex that bypasses meaning, and it will keep producing '20th' and '£6.50' on new texts.
Flyers recordings routinely correct or qualify themselves within the same exchange - 'oh no, sorry, they've closed it, so it's the sports hall'; 'not the twentieth, that's the art competition'. A child taught to write on hearing must then erase and re-decide, and many will not.
The defensible version of the advice is: hold the number until the sentence finishes, then write it only when you know who or what it belongs to. That is a different instruction and it targets the actual weakness.