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)



TO PRINT