Listening Practice Method

iCame across this on YouTube, seems an interesting approach. I don’t enough about the methodology of improving listening skills to judge whether it’d be a good approach or not but thought it was interesting as it seems to go against the standard practice I’ve come accross where you listen before and without seeing any script.

Dai

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It seems he has a point, if you’re using a course that focuses on a wide vocabulary rather than starting with patterns the way this course does. Given that the main reason he gave for this seems to have been that it allows you to build up patterns, that particular benefit is no longer there. Once you’re already familiar with those patterns though, the main point of doing plenty of listening is to pick up more vocabulary. Well, that and training your brain. Also, the use of dialogues that only use what you currently know is basically how the listening practices on this site work already (although, having some for level 2 would be nice).

As for splitting media into smaller chunks, that does seem like a decent idea; as does taking phrases and words that you’re unfamiliar with and spending time on them specifically.

This stuff about how when you’re listening to a film or a conversation and think that you’re understanding everything - I’d be inclined to suspect that’s a rather niche experience…:wink:

I agree about limited vocab dialogues - that’s essentially the same model in our listening exercises for the Levels… :slight_smile:

The thing that stood out for me (in addition to the limited dialogues as you mention) was that he was advocating reading and familiarising yourself with the dialogue before listening to it (he seems to be using the phrase “passive listening” for when you listen to a dialogue without having seen the contents prior).

In my (very limited) exposure to methods of teaching listening comprehension it seems that the more conventional method is the “passive listening” method. I don’t know anywhere near enough to be able to say whether by reading and sort of knowing what was coming before you listened to the dialogue would actually speed up and improve your listening skills in the target language, but it seemed an interesting thought.

I might try and give it a go to see what happens

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What we recommend with the Levels is one ‘fresh/clean’ listen, read the transcript, listen again, read the translation, listen once more.

And then listen once again per day - never given much direction on extra reading for that, but if I was asked I’d suggest checking the transcript again every now and again if it feels necessary…

I think there’s definitely value here - our predictive ability is a key part of oral communication, so it ought to have real value in listening work - it’s why we tell people that keeping on listening to the Levels listening exercises is worth doing, even as they start to become predictable from repetition… :slight_smile: