Sunday, November 29, 2015

SPECIFIC TOPICS: TOEFL LISTERNING TIPS (4)

LISTERNING TIPS (4)



LISTERNING SKILLS: To maintain and enhance your skills try the following:
  1. Use the resources in your community to practice listening to English.
    • Visit places in your community where you can hear English spoken.
      • Go to an English school, an embassy, or an English-speaking Chamber of Commerce.
      • Go to a museum and take an audio tour in English.
      • Follow a guided tour in English of your city.
      • Call or visit a hotel where tourists stay and get information in English about room rates, hotel availability, or hotel facilities.
      • Call and listen to information recorded in English, such as a movie schedule, a weather report, or information about an airplane flight.
    • Watch or listen to programs recorded in English.
      • Watch television programs.
        • CNN, the Discovery Channel, or National Geographic
        • Watch movies, soap operas, or situation comedies
      • Rent videos or go to a movie in English.
      • Listen to a book on tape in English.
      • Listen to music in English and then check your accuracy by finding the lyrics on the Internet (e.g., www.lyrics.com).
    • Go to Internet sites to practice listening.
      • National Public Radio (www.npr.org)
      • CBS News (www.cbsnews.com)
      • Randall’s Cyber Listening Lab (www.esl-lab.com)
      • BBC World Service.com Learning English (www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish)
    • Get CDs with full-length lectures. Full-length lectures/presentations are available from UC Berkeley.
    • Practice speaking English with others.
      • Look for a conversation partner and exchange language lessons with an English speaker who wants to learn your language.
  2. Begin to prepare for academic situations.
    • Visit academic classes, cultural centers, or museums where people are invited to talk in English about their work.
      • Before you listen to a lecture in English, read assigned chapters or background information on academic topics.
      • Visit lectures on a wide variety of topics.
    • Record lectures or presentations and replay them several times.
      • Listen to different types of talks on various topics, including subjects in which you have limited or little background.
      • Listen to short sections several times until you understand the main points and the flow of ideas.
      • Stop the recording in the middle and predict what will come next.
      • Practice listening to longer lectures.
    • Become familiar with the organization or structure of lectures.
      • Pay attention to the structure.
        • lecture or presentation—introduction, body, and conclusion
        • narrative story—beginning, middle, and end
      • Learn to recognize different styles of organization.
        • theory and evidence
        • cause and effect
        • steps of a process
        • comparison of two things
    • Think carefully about the purpose of a lecture.
      • Try to answer the question, “What is the professor trying to accomplish in this lecture?”
      • Write down only the information that you hear. Be careful not to interpret information based on your personal understanding or knowledge of the topic.
        • Answer questions based on what was actually discussed in the talk
    • Develop a note-taking strategy to help you organize information into a hierarchy of main points and supporting details.
      • Make sure your notes follow the organization of the lecture.
      • Listen for related ideas and relationships within a lecture and make sure you summarize similar information together.
      • Use your notes to write a summary.
  3. Listen for signals that will help you understand the organization of a talk, connections between ideas, and the importance of ideas.
    • Listen for expressions and vocabulary that tell you the type of information being given.
      • Think carefully about the type of information that these phrases show.
        • opinion (I think, It appears that, It is thought that)
        • theory (In theory)
        • inference (therefore, then)
        • negatives (not, words that begin with “un,” “non,” “dis,” “a”)
        • fillers (non-essential information) (uh, er, um)
      • Identify digressions (discussion of a different topic from the main topic) or jokes that are not important to the main lecture [It’s okay not to understand these!]
    • Listen for signal words and phrases that connect ideas in order to recognize the relationship between ideas.
      • Think carefully about the connection between ideas that these words show.
        • reasons (because, since)
        • results (as a result, so, therefore, thus, consequently)
        • examples (for example, such as)
        • comparisons (in contrast, than)
        • an opposing idea (on the other hand, however)
        • another idea (furthermore, moreover, besides)
        • a similar idea (similarly, likewise)
        • restatements of information (in other words, that is)
        • conclusions (in conclusion, in summary)
    • Pay attention to intonation and other ways that speakers indicate that information is important.
      • Listen for emotions expressed through changes in intonation or stress.
        • Facial expressions or word choices can indicate excitement, anger, happiness, frustration, etc.
      • Listen how native speakers divide long sentences into “thought groups” to make them easier to understand. (A thought group is a spoken phrase or short sentence. Thought groups are separated by short pauses.)
        • Listen to sets of thought groups to make sure you get the whole idea of the talk
      • Listen for important key words and phrases which are often ...
        • repeated
        • paraphrased (repeated information but using different words)
        • said louder and clearer
        • stressed
      • Listen for pauses between important points.
        • In a lecture, pay attention to words that are written on the board.
                                                                                 (From TOEFL Exam Tips)



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