New Class for TOEFL!!

WHAT MAKES LISTENING DIFFICULT?

Clustering

In spoken language, due to memory limitations and our predisposition for “chunking,” or clustering, we break donw speech into smaller groups of words…. Sometimes second language learners will try to retain overly long constituents (a whole sentence or even several sentences), or they will err in the other direction in trying to attend to every word in an utterance.

Redundancy

Spoken language, unlike written language, has a good deal of redundancy. The next time you’re in a conversation, notice the rephrasings, repetitions, elaborations,and little insertions of “I mean” and “you know.” Learners can train themselves to profit from such redundancy by first aware that not every new sentence or phrase will necessarily contain new information, and by looking for the singals of redundancy.

Reduced forms

Reduction can be phonological (“Djeetyet?” for “Did you eat yet?” / “Whachamacalit” for “what you may call it”), morphological (contractions like “You’d’v” for “You should have”), syntactic (elliptical forms like “Where are you up to?” “My room.”), or pramatic (phone rings in a house, son answers and shouts to another room upstairs, “Daddy! It’s for you!”). These reductions pose significant difficulties, especially for classroom learners who may have initially been exposed to the full forms of the English language.

Performance variables

In spoken language, except for planned discourse (lectures, speeches, product presentations, et cetera), hesitations, false stars, pauses, and corrections are common. Native listeners are conditioned from very young ages to weed out such performance variables, whereas the can easily interfere with comprehension in second language learners. Imagine listening to the verbatim excerpt of a sportsman describing his current soccer game (France versus Senegal in 2002):

But, uh—I also—to go with this of course if you’re playing well—if you’re playing well then you get upright about your game. You get keyed upo and it’s easy to focus. You know you’re playing well and you know…in with a chance then it’s easier, much easier to—to, you know, to get in there and—and start to… you don’t have to think of this. I mean it’s gotta be automatic.

Colloquial language (colloquialism)

Leaners who have been exposed to standard written English (SAE or SBE ) and/ or “textbook” language sometimes find it surprising or difficult to deal with colloquial languages. Idioms, slans, reduced forms, and shared cultural knowledge are all manifested at some point in conversations. Colloquialisms appear in boht monologues and dialogues.

Rate of delivery

Virtually every language learner initially thinks that native speakers utter too fast! Actually, as Jack Richards (1983) points out, the number and length of pauses sued by a speaker is more crucial to comprehension than sheer speed. Unlike reading, where a person can always stop to take a breath and then to go back to reread, when listening some utterances the hearer may not too frequently have a chance to stop the speaker. Instead, the flow of speech will move on.

Stress, rhythm, and intonation

Because English is a stress-timed language (unlike other language families such as Mandarine), English speech can be a terror for most EFL/ ESL learners as mouthfuls of syllables come spilling out between stress points. Also, intonation patterns are very essential not just for interpreting straitforward elements such as questions, statements and emphasis, but also for understanding and then perceiving more subtle messages like sarcasm, endearment, insult, solicitation, priase, doubt, command, and so far and so forth.

Interaction

Conversation is especially subject to all the rule of interation: negotiatio, clarification, attending singals, turn-taking; and topic nomination, maintenance, and termination.

A fourth-century Chinese proverb says it more eloquently:

Not to let a word get in the way of its sentence

Nor to let a sentence get in the way of its intention,

But to send your mind out to meet the intention as a guest;

THAT is understanding.

New Class for TOEFL!!

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