About: Pre-A1 Starters Listening Part 1

This year, (2018) Starters Listening Part 1 has changed format and focus.  But the format isn’t new to Cambridge Assessment English Young Learners.  The task is now the same as the Part 1 Listening in Movers and Flyers.  (*Although in a future post, I’ll explore the differences in this task at the different levels.)

Let’s look a the Starters Part 1 Listening task from Sample Papers 1:

Starters Sample Paper 1 is available to download here: http://www.cambridgeenglish.org/teaching-english/resources-for-teachers/

About the picture:

There are 7 people in the picture.  They are doing different things and in different places in the picture.  They are wearing different clothes.

About the names:

There are 7 names outside the picture.  These names come from the Starters wordlist.    You can download the wordlist here:  http://www.cambridgeenglish.org/images/351849-yle-starters-word-list-2018.pdf

Although a more user-friendly wordlist is the Thematic wordlist which appears in the 2018 Young Learners Handbook.  You’ll find that in the same place as the Sample Papers. http://www.cambridgeenglish.org/teaching-english/resources-for-teachers/

Here’s a list of the names for Starters, Movers and Flyers here:

Back to the task.  There is an example, and then students have to draw lines between five names and five people in the picture.

At Starters level, students hear each name twice.  They also hear two pieces of information about each person.

You can see that the boy (Mch) says his friend’s name (Pat) two times and we hear that Pat is with the cats, holding one cat and that he loves animals.

We then hear information about five other people in the picture.  This means that in Starters, there will be one extra name (which we won’t hear) and one person who won’t be described.  Make sure your students know this!

Students will hear the conversation twice and there are 5 second pauses in the conversation, which gives students plenty of time to draw their lines.

In my next post, I’ll share some tips for this part of the Starters Listening.