As for listening, I do agree that  it's impractical to improve the students' level greatly, but we can train the students to get every score possible in section 1 and section 2. This means drilling them in something basic like spelling, unit nouns etc. to avoid FUSSI mistakes. 

Also, to address the problem that students can understand what they hear, but don't know what words to write for the blanks, we should give them more paraphrase exercises to increase their awareness of how to express the same idea in different ways. That's a big challenge for most students.

As far as reading is concerned, what the students need is excersice on getting at the main idea of certain paragraph quickly. This is also something the writing teaching should emphasize--giving a clear topoc before going into details in each paragraph. More exercise can be done on cohesion and coherence. 

And I think what we teachers need most is more interesting activites and authentic materials designed to develop students' English scientifically and steadily.: good questions for leading them in and ways to activating students' schemata.