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Immersed or just paddling? – DELE B2 review part 3

You would think living in Spain would mean you could get fluent in Spanish quickly, even if your reading and writing skills trailed behind, right? I mean, this is immersion, isn’t it? My DELE B2 exam showed that the opposite is happening with me. Here’s what I learnt about the DELE B2 Oral during my preparation and actual exam.

For my notes on the reading comprehension and writing parts see Part 1. For the listening exam review see To Listen or Not to Listen Part 2.

Oral: Looking at the breakdown of my results, the oral was what I did worst on. With 67%, I passed without needing to compensate with points from the listening (they are grouped) but not by a lot. You need 60% overall in the Oral and Listening combined in order to pass the whole exam. When I sat the DELE B1 a year before I got a good score in the Oral (95%), so obviously this is the skill where I’ve made the least progress.

DELE B2 results

I can understand people thinking there’s something strange about living in Spain and not getting a fabulous grade in the oral! Other people in non-Spanish speaking countries around the world are slogging away for this same exam wondering how they can get the oral exposure they need, and here am I in jamón-land itself and still struggling.

I put it down to two things. Partly having other interests (including my kids!) so no time to join extra conversation classes or go to meet-ups. Actually, the fact that I passed at all shows how determined I was to squeeze half an hour of work out of a nap time or rare quiet moment when the kids actually played nicely together without involvement from me. I already had to pay for babysitting in order to attend my 3 hours of Spanish class each week.

Secondly, I’m in a strange paradox of language immersion, which is to say that my oldest is immersed in Spanish school all day, so I work hard to un-immerse her the rest of the time, and do activities with her like learning to read in French. At the same time the little one has been at home, building a solid basis in English and French, which he needed before jumping into Spanish school this September. So I haven’t had local radio or TV on at home the way I used to listen to French radio non-stop in Paris. So sometimes I feel like I am far, far from being immersed in Spanish. More like just paddling! While I try to keep the kids from being submerged to the detriment of their other languages.

So yes, there are many things I could do to improve more quickly, but I have chosen not to for other reasons. Real life is a bundle of priorities vying for attention, not a single neatly drawn set of goalposts. Still I feel much more fluent than last year, so I am happy that the progress is there, even if slow! I deeply believe in being around my kids and keeping their heritage languages alive, and despite being a perfectionist, I figure I can live with the fact that my main priorities must be reflected in my achievements.

Of course, now they have both started school, I need to get more exposure at the same time as they are getting it, and that side of things should be easier. But if you are out there learning Spanish while living in your home country, take heart! You can probably achieve things I can’t here in Spain.

So for what it’s worth, these were my views on the Oral exam:

You really have to throw yourself into whatever you choose quickly (a bit like the writing). You have to have opinions. I have plenty of opinions, believe me, but not necessarily on the topics that came up. I was asked a lot of questions that led to a similar answer. Perhaps the examiner was short on inspiration about the role of video surveillance in preventing street crime, like me, because she seemed to ask several variants of the same question. Or maybe there was something I was supposed to be saying but I didn’t get it. Fortunately, unlike during the B1, the examiner didn’t have her strident mobile phone alarm interrupt us every couple of minutes to mark the end of each section.

Oral Tarea 1 – proposals

Prior to getting the book Cronómetro I didn’t think I could prepare the oral much. I felt either you can talk and adapt to new situations quickly enough, or you can’t. But I was wrong and I’m so glad I realised this (just) before the day of the exam. (Here’s my review of the book.) I would say that knowing the exact format of the Oral can help enormously. The key point I learnt was that Tarea 1 is usually a debate on a topic, with five or six proposed measures or solutions to a problem (be it street crime, pollution, waste management, unemployment, etc). You have to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of the solutions, agree, disagree, hypothesise on consequences and usually conclude by choosing the best solution. Firstly as a monologue and later responding to questions. There is very little time to actually analyse the content but the framework of your sentences is very similar regardless of the topic. So I worked on expressions like:

-A mi paracer / Desde mi punto de vista…

-Hay quienes dicen que…, sin embargo…

-No estoy convencida de que + subjunctive

-Aunque quisiera pensar de otra manera…

-una medida, una sugerencia, una propuesta

-Hay que tener en cuenta…

-La solución que se destaca…

It seemed to me these would work in any B2 Oral Task 1. As you can see there’s lots of scope for the subjunctives.

Oral Tarea 2 – picture

One thing I did find strange was that again, like in the DELE B1, I seemed to have to share the sheets with the examiner sitting opposite me. Whether this was because they could not manage a few more photocopies, or because she was trying to avoid candidates from reading text from the paper as that would result in a low grade, I don’t know. But it seems to me you cannot be asked to describe a picture or interpret a chart without a good view of it. Even if you looked at it during the 20mn prep time.

Oral Tarea 3 – stats

If I do decide to sit the next level up, I will start preparing the Oral earlier, now that I know it is possible (and my weakest point!).

Looking back, I feel the whole idea of points compensating within the two groups of tests helps to cover you if one nightmare comes true, for example if you blank in the oral, if you misread a key word in the pautas for the reading exam, or if you have a coughing fit in the listening, like the girl in with us did. But it won’t cover you if your skills are genuinely weak in listening and speaking or if you simply don’t know the grammar required for the reading and writing. So I’d say you need to know your stuff, but then you can mentally de-stress and allow yourself one disaster. Which is quite a luxury for an exam.

Next up my book review for Cronómetro in Part 4.

To listen or not to listen – DELE B2 review part 2

It might seem odd to say I made sure not to listen to some parts of the listening exam, but there it is. Incidentally, the prueba auditiva was the one in which I felt my technique (as opposed to my actual skills) played the biggest role in my grade. Also the five tasks always follow the same format, so familiarity helps a great deal.

Task 1 DELE B2

The most important thing I learnt while preparing this part was how to deal with the speed. Some of the conversations are fast, but what’s worse is that you hardly have time to read all the text on the multiple choice exam paper. You need to keep up as there’s no chance to recapture lost audio. If you have windows open onto the street, now is the time to ask for them to be closed. Better to sweat for 40 minutes than miss a word here and there. One poor girl had a coughing fit in my exam room and briefly drowned out the audio until she very decently left the room.

Task 2 DELE B2

What I learnt boils down to:

Read ahead whenever you can. In reality this means: From the moment the audio is started, only listen to the important bits, not to all the loud but useless blurb they play you intermittently. If you’ve prepared, you really don’t need to be listening passively while they tell you about copyright, who the examination board is, how many minutes it will last and when and where to fill in your answers. It’s a waste of time. Incidentally you can fill in your answers whenever you want. All the blurb is written down anyway, and the only instructions you might need to glance over during the exam are where it says next to each exercise (tarea) how many seconds you have to read it before the recording will begin (ranges from 20 to 30 seconds) and maybe the bit that says match five of the nine dialogues to five people, with four being left out.

You cannot read one thing and listen to something else at the same time, so trying to understand the multiple choice options on the paper and take in the audio conversations simultaneously is impossible. If you can do that then you have booked the wrong level and should be doing a harder exam!

So that’s what the reading time of 20 or 30 seconds per exercise is for, right? Well that’s enough time for the short tareas at the beginning, but the longer ones, well I couldn’t read those in my native tongue in just 30 seconds. To solve this conundrum, during the blurb, you need to read ahead and take on board the possible answers so you can easily choose the correct one when the recording is playing. So as soon as I had finished an exercise I immediately moved on to preparing the next one. You can prepare the first two (short) exercises during the initial blurb, and that gives you a head start.

Task 3 DELE B2

If you get caught out and find yourself listening to a long radio interview only to realise you haven’t had time to read the latter questions at all… the best thing is to close your eyes and listen with your full concentration to the audio. Since you can’t read and listen without missing vital details, best try to take in all that is said, and you will be able to weigh the options at the end and choose the right one. You do get some time at the end of each to fill in answers, but not a lot.

Task 4 DELE B2

The answer sheet is the only one that counts at pens-down, but you can write on the exam paper too if it helps. I underlined a few key words to look out for. I found it useful to cross out options that were definitely disproven to make it easier to see what options were left. If you mark your answers in on the exam paper before transferring to the hoja de respuestas, you reduce the chance of getting half way through an exercise and realising you were one column off and have filled in the wrong meaningless little multiple-choice boxes and no longer know what the right answers were to fix it. Still, be on guard against running out of time. I transferred my answers during the test when I could spare a few seconds, not only at the end since I didn’t want some slip to get in the way of completing the answer sheet. Always practice within the allotted time.

Task 5 DELE B2

Some actors in the audio have full-on Argentinian or Columbian accents and the setting can be anywhere in the Spanish-speaking world, so it helps to be familiar with the accents and with the big city names of Latin America and associated adjectives.

My score for the prueba auditiva was 93%, meaning I got 28 out of 30 questions right. For me, having a technique for this part was crucial, and also acts as a back-up to the Oral, since that’s the highest stress part which – like a driving test – can go very wrong on the day itself. I realised that I could have done a fair bit worse in the Oral and still passed, thanks to a much better grade in its pair, the listening.

More on the grouping/compensating in Part 1. My notes on the Oral exam will follow in Part 3.

NB: Photos are from various test papers done in preparation, not the actual exam!