Seguimos.

Okay, so the second test was a huge surprise-- not so much to the people who had already heard the rumors, but that probably isn't most people. In the announcement this test wasn't described much differently than other years, but it was totally different. It turned out to be a listening, which we heard twice, and then had to answer a series of questions, some about the content of the listening and some about more general topics.

The listening was an excerpt from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, starting from the beginning (she was still falling down the rabbit hole when the text ended.) There were two speakers: the narrator, and a girl (or young woman) who spoke as Alice on a few occasions. Both of them had American accents, which was really strange, since here British English is what they teach in the schools. No doubt that contributed to the difficulty for many. I thought they spoke clearly and not too quickly, but apparently a lot of people thought it was really difficult to understand. Luckily, there were questions that could be answered without really understanding the listening.

Then after the questions, it asked us to write a 250-word summary of the text that would be appropriate for 6th grade, and write 3 comprehension questions to go with the text we wrote for that age group, and to justify our questions. So, a lot to cover. Unfortunately, I started off my summary too late into the text-- instead of setting the scene with Alice and her sister sitting under a tree on a warm summer day, I jumped right into the action with her seeing the rabbit run by. This meant that I ran out of things to say before 250 words, so my text was a bit short (I was also running out of time.) Too bad I couldn't have crossed off the first paragraph and started again. But after hearing the comments of other people, I think that I will still have done relatively well.

Here is the text: we got up to "‘And what an ignorant little girl she’ll think me for asking! No, it’ll never do to ask: perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere.’ Reading it over, I see that it is quite a difficult text, and now I am wondering about one of the questions-- I answered it one way, and gave a second example just in case, and now I am wondering if that second and much more obscure example was really what they were looking for after all (if it had been a reading comp rather than listening, I'm almost sure that would have been the answer.) In any case, the question was worded generally enough that either answer would be valid, at least in my opinion.

So, that was the second test. A very unpleasant surprise for many...