Listening multiple matching: concessive support versus postponement
Four students at a Hamburg Gymnasium are practising multiple matching with a panel discussion from a school radio podcast. The motion is 'Hamburg should ban private cars from the city centre by 2030'. The task lists four statements and four speakers; each statement matches one speaker. Speaker 1 says: 'I'm not opposed to a car-free centre. But 2030? We haven't even electrified the bus fleet. That deadline is fantasy.' Speaker 2 says: 'For me the health evidence is decisive. And why stop at private cars? Delivery vans cause at least as much congestion.' Speaker 3 says: 'I'd rather we waited. The pilot scheme won't report until 2028. Locking ourselves in now is backwards.' Speaker 4 says: 'My concern is who bears the cost. If only people who can afford a new electric car can move freely, that's not a green policy, it's a privilege.' Lukas matches Speaker 1 to 'Wants the decision postponed until pilot data exist' and Speaker 3 to 'Backs the plan but considers the deadline unworkable'. He has two minutes to review before the answer sheet is collected.
1. Correct Lukas's two matches and explain the linguistic cues he missed.
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Speaker 1 should match 'Backs the plan but considers the deadline unworkable', not the postponement statement. The cue is the concessive structure: 'I'm not opposed to a car-free centre' concedes support in principle, while 'But 2030? ... That deadline is fantasy' attacks the timetable, not the principle. Speaker 3 should match 'Wants the decision postponed until pilot data exist'. The cues are 'I'd rather we waited' and 'The pilot scheme won't report until 2028', followed by 'Locking ourselves in now is backwards'. Lukas has matched on isolated words: 'deadline' and 'waited' feel similar, but the statements differ in whether the speaker supports the policy. In multiple matching, the decisive information is usually in the concessive or causal clause, not the first clause.
2. Write a one-sentence rule for distinguishing 'supports but doubts feasibility' from 'wants to postpone the decision' in this kind of task.
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Ask what the speaker would do now: a 'supports but doubts feasibility' speaker accepts the goal and rejects the timetable, often with concessive 'I'm not opposed ... but'; a 'postpone' speaker rejects a present commitment and asks for more evidence, often with 'wait', 'pilot', 'premature' or 'before we decide'. In the panel, Speaker 1 never says 'wait'; she says the deadline is unrealistic. Speaker 3 never says the ban is wrong in principle; she says the evidence is not yet in. The distinction is between criticising a date and opposing a decision at this point.
3. How should Lukas use the two-minute review to check the remaining matches?
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He should check each match against the statement's attitude verb, not the topic. For each speaker, he should underline the concessive marker ('I'm not opposed', 'For me ... decisive', 'I'd rather') and the causal or evidential clause ('because', 'until', 'if'). Then he should ask whether the statement describes the speaker's stance toward the proposal, the timing, the scope, or the fairness. He should also check that no speaker has been used twice and that the remaining two matches are consistent with the same method. Two minutes is enough for this if he works from the statements' key distinctions rather than re-reading every transcript line.