How to become better at listening french GCSE?

Hello there is only one day until i will do my listening AQA and i am a bit stressed. I am not good at listening and its the one section which degrades my french grades. I struggle alot and when i listen to the previous gcse listening tests, i barely can understand anything. How can i improve on my listening? Thanks!

Reply 1

LazyLexi

6

It's been a while since I finished my french GCSE, but what I'd suggest is you learn the key words for the topics you're doing and just say them out loud to yourself to try to get a feel for how they actually sound. Similarly, just try to remember a few key phrases and how they sound. The ones I'd recoomend are things like il y a / il n'y a pas, ne... rien, ne... jamais etc, because they are the ones that can change the meaning of an extract. You want to be listening out for the bits you understand, and trying to just focus on them. Obviously you want that to be as much as possible, but at this stage it's best to just find the absolute essentials for your course and actually listen to the words. Don't get bogged down with any words you really don't understand, because if you're busy worrying about them you won't be able to focus on the rest of the words. With the GCSE extracts in particular, the wording of the questions often allows you to work out what the answer might be even if you only heard a few of the relevant words. Good luck, be sure to update this when you've finished saying how it went, and I'm really sorry if this isn't helpful for you.

Reply 2

zarabbvv

10

Original post by LazyLexi

It's been a while since I finished my french GCSE, but what I'd suggest is you learn the key words for the topics you're doing and just say them out loud to yourself to try to get a feel for how they actually sound. Similarly, just try to remember a few key phrases and how they sound. The ones I'd recoomend are things like il y a / il n'y a pas, ne... rien, ne... jamais etc, because they are the ones that can change the meaning of an extract. You want to be listening out for the bits you understand, and trying to just focus on them. Obviously you want that to be as much as possible, but at this stage it's best to just find the absolute essentials for your course and actually listen to the words. Don't get bogged down with any words you really don't understand, because if you're busy worrying about them you won't be able to focus on the rest of the words. With the GCSE extracts in particular, the wording of the questions often allows you to work out what the answer might be even if you only heard a few of the relevant words. Good luck, be sure to update this when you've finished saying how it went, and I'm really sorry if this isn't helpful for you.

completely agree with this!! and also, just slowly going through past listenings (even if you've done them before...) i think helps too - just getting used to how the examiner's speak / pacing etc. and doing them in timed conditions also helps!

best of luck for your listening exam, and i'm sure it'll go well!