Hörverstehen / Listening Comprehension (Teil A)
Listening comprehension (Hörverstehen) belongs to Teil A of the Berlin LK written Abitur - the comprehension part answered without a dictionary. You hear authentic audio (radio features, interviews, podcasts, speeches) in British, American and other varieties, normally played twice, and answer items testing global understanding, selective detail and the speaker's stance. Marks come from evidence, not from vocabulary recognition.
What the items actually test
- Global: topic, purpose, target audience, headline matching.
- Selective: grids, speaker-to-statement matching, tick-the-true-items.
- Detail: short answers on reasons, figures, sequences.
- Stance: attitude, certainty, irony - carried by hedges (arguably, up to a point), intensifiers and concession.
A two-playing routine
- First playing: build a speaker map - who speaks, what each wants, where the item boundaries fall. Jot abbreviations only.
- In the pause: underline the decisive word in each stem and predict a paraphrase; the correct answer rarely reuses the recording's wording.
- Second playing: confirm or correct at the exact phrase; write English answers inside the word limit.
Worked example
Item: The interviewer believes the scheme has failed. Transcript line (original): Interviewer: I wouldn't go quite that far - the figures are disappointing, but calling it a failure ignores what has happened in the smaller towns. Reasoning: the stem borrows the recording's lexis (failed / failure), which is the trap. I wouldn't go that far rejects the label; the concession (disappointing) is followed by but, which carries the actual position. Answer: False - she calls the figures disappointing but rejects failure because of the smaller towns. The answer needs the reason, not just False.
Traps that cost marks
- Word-matching: a stem reuses a term the speaker uses in a different sense or about a different subject.
- Missed negation and hedging: not necessarily, far from certain, I doubt.
- Self-correction: at first I thought ... but then overrides the earlier statement; the later version is the answer.
- Numbers delivered twice or as fractions (two-thirds = 66 per cent).
- Answers in German, verbatim copying, or exceeding the limit.
- Blank items: a short plausible answer can still earn partial credit.