Although some say that the Use of English is harder than listening, this part of the Olympiad requires a surprising amount of practice and absolute concentration to achieve high results. 🙂
Personally, getting a full mark during закл for this part of the Olympiad was possible only through Moscow Region team practice, frustration and a lot of individual work.
💐 I'm here to share what you can do to increase your chances of scoring high points on this part.
One general misconception regarding Olympiad listening tasks is that watching English-dubbed anime or game livestreams will get you a diploma. The tasks in the Olympiad are strictly formatted, which implies that you should spend time solving textbook exercises and past papers.
💐 What does the listening part consist of?
The listening part is a portion of a larger task block, which is called listening and reading (L&R). The maximum score you can get for L&R is 40 points.
The typical listening part consists of:
💜A true or false task (monologue; 10 questions)
💜A short dialogue task (dialogue; 3 answer options; the recording is usually played only once; 5 questions)
💜An integrated listening and reading task (first you listen, then you read; 4 answer options; 10 statements)
💐 What should you do?
Past papers 🎨
One of the most efficient ways to prepare is to solve as many past papers as you can. As the grades 9 to 11 have the same L&R (listening and reading) materials, you can choose any of the available variants from this website. I recommend practising for the particular stage of the Olympiad that's coming up and doing the entire listening part first. In case you want targeted practice for one of the task types, you can focus on it specifically.
💙 When you make a mistake, make sure to understand why the answer you circled is incorrect. You can listen to the recording again after checking your responses. This is important for understanding the jurors' logic and preventing similar mistakes further on. It's best not to get stuck on a single mistake and ensure that you continue practising.
Be mindful of the number of times the examiners allow you to listen to the recording!! It can vary from year to year for different listening tasks.
CAE/CPE tasks + IELTS 📿
This is incredibly helpful if you're tired of solving past papers or would like to beef up your listening skills even more. The available formats in these Cambridge exams are relatively similar to the Olympiad, and they train a similar sort of skill for picking out auditory information.
💙 The most useful parts of the CAE and CPE listening tests for Olympiad preparation would be parts 1, 3 and 4. The test booklets almost always have recording transcripts and even answer explanations, so you can always refer to these if you don't understand your mistakes.
Another source that you can use (yet avoid relying on it too heavily) is the IELTS listening tasks, which can be accessed online (no need to download any PDFs). However, this type of format is more applicable if you're trying to practise the dialogue task from ВсОШ.
What about the integrated task? 🤩
Integrated listening and reading is a unique format produced especially for ВсОШ. Therefore, the exercise bank for it is limited. Some of the resources that I used for practice are the past papers and Gulov's Great Lengths. The latter includes some integrated tasks that are based on country studies materials, including famous speeches, so please, do check it out!
🤩 We are planning to produce tasks of the kind so that there would be more integrated L&R exercises that you could work on, so stay tuned)
For the funsies 🤩
Of course, this doesn't mean that you should only be training for the format. One of the ways you can improve your general listening skills and pick up new vocabulary is watching YouTube vlogs/channels.
Here is my list of channel recommendations:
💜 TwoSet Violin - for those who stopped playing a musical instrument because of doing Olympiads (aka me and perhaps some of you)
Ставьте ❤️ и листайте дальше
#knowhow