Amina: three weeks, 45 minutes a day, four different listening failures
Amina is 24, works night shifts in a care home and sits her B1 SELT in three weeks. She has 45 minutes a day, usually at 07:00 after a shift ends. Her last timed listening mock scored 12 out of 26, and the answer sheet shows four separate problems.
Form completion: 6 out of 10. She wrote check for cheque, 8.15 for 8.50, and north where the speaker said 'north' and then corrected herself - 'sorry, south'.
Multiple choice: 3 out of 7. In four items she chose the option containing words she had heard, not the option that matched the meaning.
Three items were left blank because she was still thinking about the previous question.
She has never listened to a recording twice, never read a transcript, and says: 'By the third speaker I stop hearing English and just hear noise.' She also admits she does most practice on the bus, with one earbud in.
1. Categorise Amina's errors and decide what to work on first in the 21 days available. Justify the order.
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Four separate failures are being scored as one.
- Encoding. cheque/check is a homophone; 8.15/8.50 is number discrimination. In note completion the word must be spelled correctly, so these marks are lost even though she heard the word.
- Distractor management. 'north… sorry, south' is a self-correction. The first value mentioned is placed there to be chosen; this is a strategy error, not a vocabulary gap.
- Item strategy. Choosing the option with heard words is a lexical trap she is falling into repeatedly.
- Recovery behaviour. Three blanks and the 'noise' comment point to working-memory overload, not an inability to hear English.
Order by marks recoverable per hour. First, the no-blank rule: a guess costs nothing, a blank is a guaranteed zero, and dwelling on a missed item caused further misses. Second, correction markers and distractor awareness - worth about seven marks across the MCQ and correction items. Third, number and letter dictation, quick to drill. Last, spelling, the smallest pool, fixed from her own error list rather than a dictionary.
2. Design her weekly routine inside 45 minutes a day. Say what she does with the audio and when she may look at the transcript, and justify the choices.
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Five days of 45 minutes, plus one longer session on a day she has slept.
Daily, 30–35 minutes. One short exam-style extract, played once and answered as in the test. Then the transcript: she marks where the answer was signalled, circles correction markers ('actually', 'sorry', 'I mean'), and re-listens while reading. Then she covers the transcript and listens a third time. Transcript after answering, never before - reading first turns a listening task into a reading task.
10 minutes: dictation. Times, prices, postcodes, surnames, dates, read aloud by an app or a voice-note from you. She writes, then checks letter by letter. This targets the cheque and 8.50 failures directly.
Weekend: one full timed section, at the time of day her real test starts, no pausing. Because she works nights, at least one session a week should be run while she is as tired as she may be on test day; practising only when fresh builds a skill she cannot use.
Error log: one page, three columns - what I heard, what it was, why I missed it.
3. What should she do during the test itself when she realises she has missed an answer?
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Decide the rule in practice now, so that the test only requires following it.
One pass. If the answer has not landed within about two seconds of the relevant line, write the most plausible guess, put a dot beside it, and move her eyes to the next question. The recording will not wait. Staying on the missed item is what produced the three blanks last time, and each blank costs a second mark because the next answer is then missed too.
Guess rather than leave a blank. In completion items the field is usually guessable from grammar and context - a price, a day, a surname - and a wrong guess scores the same as nothing, so the guess is free.
Use transfer or checking time to return to dotted items, and check spelling then, not during the recording.
If she loses a whole section - the 'noise' feeling - she should stop trying to understand everything and listen only for the specific information her remaining questions need. That is a narrower, achievable task.