John’s EFL Cafe

Hello everyone !! It has been too long since i posted an entry here. I recently received a very sincere comment from a reader of this blog. Here is what they said

“Hi, John,
I keep practising listening everyday whenever I go home on the road. But I become a little confused now because most of my materials are Radio, like BBC/VOA which are all about political news. I found these political news might not be suitable to listen because even though I can understand those, sometimes, I still can’t understand the oral English in the normal life, in other words, my listening and speaking proficiency are still not be improved. So, I was wondering whether I shouldn’t listen those Radio again? Is it better to choose another more suitable listening materials? If you think so, what kind of materials should I choose?”

I am sharing this comment because it is typical of the kind of question i have been asked by students over the years. I have already addressed [written about] this topic to some extent in my blog entry and the one that followed that.

Today I would like to continue writing on this topic by introducing the concept of ‘context’. You can get a deeper understanding of the meaning of the word ‘context’ here.

Context is necessary for learning because it is how our brains attach meaning to new information. When we listen to V.O.A. [Voice of America] or B.B.C. [{the}British Broadcasting Corporation] we are listening to a news channel meant primarily [mainly] for native English speakers who are living outside their own country and who wish to keep up with news in their own countries. I know that there are special programs for language learners but, those aside, V.O.A. and B.BC. are NOT good sources for students of English unless they have a fairly good level of listening comprehension to begin with. The reason they are not good learning sources is that the content of the stories you will hear [the context] is information that you as a language learner are not familiar with. You do not know the political leaders of these countries nor most other countries outside of China for that matter. You are not aware of world events. You do not understand either the economic systems of these countries nor the affairs being discussed. As a result of your lack of knowledge about these issues [politics, economics, trade relations, election issues, etc.] you could not possibly understand what is being spoken about, even if your English language listening comprehension is good.

I am fully aware that it has been conventional wisdom [advice] from English teachers within the Chinese school system for you to listen to these sources as a way of improving your listening [comprehension]. . I believe this comes from an era [time] when it made sense to suggest a ‘free’ source of ‘real’ native English and when radios were a cheap and convenient way to access that source of authentic English. At the same time, we are all aware that in today’s world students of all levels are overloaded with work and for those of you who are now working, you are far too busy to have the time that this approach would require to yield [give you] decent results in terms of your skill level improvement . In a word, it is a far too inefficient [time consuming] method to use for the purpose of improving your listening comprehension.

My standard approach to answering this question is to begin by going back to your language learning foundation [in English] and to acknowledge that most of you can read English reasonably well [at lease in the word-after-word sense] . So, if you have a reasonable word recognition level when reading English, it stands to reason that if you listen to words you know as you read them, your brain/mind will associate [connect] the familiar written word with the sound of the word. Once your brain has an adequate supply of these remembered ‘sound words’ - meaning words it recognizes just based on their sound, you will recognize and understand the meaning of those words when you hear them. So, as a language learners, your goal should be to increase the number of words your brain can recognize by hearing their sound alone [not by seeing them] .

What I am getting at is that -to answer the question of the reader who left the comment posted at the beginning of this blog entry - the best material you can use to help you develop better listening comprehension [understanding what is being heard] , is material you can already read and understand and then, by listening to it, you can learn to jump from reading comprehension to listening comprehension. The fact that you have become familiar with the material through reading means that you already know the ‘context’ of that material. Hence, your main focus in listening to it is to learn to bridge from reading comprehension to listening comprehension. When you listen to B.B.C. or V.O.A. your lack of knowledge of the background ‘context’ of the stories gets in the way of your learning process.

More about topic this next time. In the mean time, this is John, doing my best to make sense of English for YOU.