‘Listen harder and longer’ !
All of you reading this have been told many times that there are four language skill areas. I’ll call them skill groups since each of the four have several ’sub’ skills to be masterd. In my experience teaching in universities in China I heard students reiterate this many times. [For the meaning of re-it-er-ate please visit http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/reiterate ]
I found that there was some confusion in the minds of almost all students about how to improve these skills. In this post I will begin to address the major skill ‘listening’ .
Have you ever been asked to improve your ‘listening’? It’s IMPOSSIBLE !!!! ‘Blasphame’ you say ! [ http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/blaspheme ] Not at all. You can not imrove your listening. What you CAN improve is your ‘listening comprehension’. [ http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/comprehension ] Comprehension; if you have followed the link to the definition I just gave you, means to be able to understand, and here the idea is: improving your listening comprehension means being able to understand MORE of what you are listening to. THAT is desireable as well as acheivable!!!!!
In the course of teaching at Da Wai here in Dalian I had the good fortune of teaching two adult classes at the universities adult college. One of these classes had several former teachers who were upgrading their skills and education. Amoung this delightful group there was a woman with whom I spoke at length on this subject after giving a class on the topic some weeks before. She had applied my suggestions for improving her ‘listening comprehension’ and she told me my suggestions worked very well. She also told me that the ‘conventional wisdom’ she had received from her [Chinese] English teacher when she asked HER how to improve this skill was ‘Listen longer’ meaning spend more time listening.
Now I ask you; if you can’t DO something well and you ‘do more of it’ without CHANGING anything, HOW in the world will it improve? Answer. You won’t.
In order to improve anything we must do one of the following: a] change some habit b] learn some new skills c] be hit by lightning and suddenly be a genious at English [just kidding!].
In the coming posts to this blog I will attempt to address this issue of what habits are getting in your way now and what new skills can be learned to make it easier for you to imrove your listening comprehension.