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Listen to some sentences from college lectures. Take notes as quickly as you can.


Unit 2. What Makes a Good Listening Text?

 

2.1 What factors do you think influence listening comprehension? Share your ideas with a partner.

 

2.2 Listen to four passages on the topic “Food”. What are the differences in level, speed, complexity, density, vocabulary and authenticity?

 

2.3 Look at the list of features. Which are typical of scripted dialogues and which are usually found in authentic speech?

 

a) No background noise

b) Overlaps and interruptions between speakers

c) Loosely packed information, padded out with fillers like um and er

d) Structured language, more like written English

e) Normal rate of speech delivery

f) Complete sentences

g) Relatively unstructured language

h) Background noise and voices

i) Little overlap between speakers

j) Slower (maybe monotonous) delivery

k) Densely packed information

l) Incomplete sentences, with false starts and hesitation

 

2.4 Listen to five passages. Which are authentic? Which are scripted? What features tell us this?

 

  Authentic or scripted? Features
Passage 1    
Passage 2    
Passage 3    
Passage 4    
Passage 5    

 

2.5 Read three situations in which students have problems in listening. What strategies would you suggest?

 

1.

A Brazilian economist on a lecture tour in the UK thought he needed to learn a lot more English, and came for one-to-one lessons. My first reaction was: ‘I can’t improve this man’s English in a dozen lessons over two months. Why does he want lessons?’

A brief interview revealed that his set-piece lectures went fine. The trouble came at question time. He felt he did not understand the question. I gave him a cassette recorder to tape his next post-lecture question session.

At our next meeting he plays back the cassette: it was clear to both of us that he was not letting the questioner finish the question. He leapt in with the answer, regularly cutting the questioner short. He then admitted to me that he had a card-index in his mind of about 40 economic or political categories into which questions neatly fitted. If he heard a question he thought was coming from category 28, he immediately came in with stock answer 28. Working in English, he would often miscategorise, and so give a brilliant answer to the wrong question and the wrong mindset. In so doing, he would frequently antagonize the questioner.

(from Davis, P, Garside, B and Rinvolucri, M (1998) Ways of Doing, Cambridge University Press, page 125)

 

2.

 

A student in a private language school wanted to understand news broadcasts in English, which he accessed from the Internet. He was a high-level student, and very motivated, but the broadcasts were just too difficult. He found that the newsreaders spoke very fast and he couldn’t keep up. Also, the changes of topic as the newsreader went from one news story to the next were difficult because suddenly you ‘needed to activate a whole new vocabulary’. He asked me what he could do.



 

3.

 

I was training a student for a general proficiency exam. In all other respects she was at the right level for the exam — her speaking, writing, vocabulary and grammar were OK — but she kept failing the practice tests we did for the listening part of the exam. We looked closely at where she was failing and found that she would always get the first question correct but then her performance would tail off. By the time she got round to the final questions for each passage, she barely wrote any answers.

 


Date: 2015-12-18; view: 1192


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