Zwar, aber, allerdings: the concessive interview
Listening paper, Part 3: a four-minute interview with Lena, a 19-year-old apprentice (Ausbildung zur Mechatronikerin) about the dual system. Items are multiple choice and true/false, and the recording is played twice. Karl recognises words well but answers from the first clause he fully understands. Item 4: “War die Ausbildung am Anfang schwer?” Options: “ja, aber sie hat sich daran gewöhnt” versus “ja, und es ist bis heute schwer”. Lena says: “Am Anfang war es wirklich hart, aber inzwischen würde ich sagen, es läuft.” Karl chooses the second. Item 6 (true/false): “Sie würde die Ausbildung wieder machen.” Lena says: “Ich würde es wieder tun - allerdings würde ich mich vorher besser informieren.” Karl marks false. Item 8: “Was kritisiert sie?” She criticises the first-year pay and praises her colleagues. Karl writes “die Kollegen”. Afterwards he says: “She said aber and allerdings, so I thought it was negative.” The teacher has one double lesson before the next mock.
1. Name the discourse pattern behind all three errors and analyse each item separately.
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One pattern: concessive constructions put the answer in the second clause, and the first clause is a setup. Karl is listening for words, not for direction.
- Item 4. Am Anfang war es hart is the setup; aber inzwischen … es läuft is the answer. He stopped at the first complete proposition, so he chose the option that repeats the setup. Note that the distractor is not a lie - it is the first half of the truth, which is what makes it attractive.
- Item 6. Allerdings qualifies the commitment; it does not reverse it. “I would do it again, though I would inform myself better first” is still a yes. He treated a hedging connector as a negator.
- Item 8. Different error, same cause: he matched Kollegen to kritisiert without checking polarity - she praises the colleagues and criticises the pay. Word-matching across a value judgement.
The self-diagnosis (“aber and allerdings, so I thought it was negative”) is useful: he believes the connectors mean negative. They do not; they mean contrast or qualification. That misconception must be named explicitly, or drills will not transfer.
2. Is Karl's “false” on Item 6 defensible? What should the mark scheme say, and what does the item reveal about true/false design?
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No - the mark is not defensible, but the item deserves some of the blame.
- The proposition Sie würde die Ausbildung wieder machen is directly asserted: Ich würde es wieder tun. Allerdings adds a condition; it does not negate the proposition. A true/false item asks whether the statement is supported by the text, not whether it is supported unconditionally. On that reading the answer is true, unambiguously.
- But the item is fragile. If the intention was to test the allerdings, the statement should have been written to be sensitive to it - e.g. Sie würde alles genauso wieder machen. Then the qualifier genuinely makes it false, and the item measures what it claims to measure. As written, a careful candidate can hesitate for the right reasons and be marked wrong, which is worse than a careless one being marked right.
- Mark scheme wording to adopt: “True if the statement is supported by the text, even where the speaker adds a qualification.” Apply it to every true/false item in the paper so the convention is visible.
- Action: mark the script against the existing key, then send the item for revision and tell the class why, so they learn the convention rather than the item.
3. Design the double-lesson drill sequence, keeping it transferable beyond these three items.
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- Minimal pairs, 10 min. Read ten two-clause statements; students hold up a card for the final direction only: +, −, or qualified. No writing of content, so attention stays on direction.
- Connector substitution, 10 min. Give sentences with the connector blanked: aber / dennoch / trotzdem / allerdings / zwar … aber. Students choose and then discuss which are interchangeable in that position - the discussion is the point, because allerdings and aber are not synonyms in their rhetorical effect.
- Dictogloss, 15 min. Play a 40-second segment twice; pairs reconstruct the argument in note form, then compare whether their reconstructed position matches the original. Content accuracy is secondary; stance accuracy is the target.
- Evidence discipline, 15 min. For every item, students must underline the exact words that made them choose. If the underlined words sit in a different clause from the answer, they must justify the link in one sentence. This makes the “first clause” habit visible to them and to you.
- Rule for the room: no item is discussed until the evidence is underlined. Otherwise the class rehearses answers instead of procedures.