Part 4. Short talks on listening skills.

Listen to the short talk entitled "Letting things go——speed and vocabulary".

Some important words are taken away from the written passage.

Supply the missing words.

Letting things go——speed and vocabulary.

Many English language learners believe that the greatest difficulty with listening comprehension is that the listener cannot control how quickly a speaker speaks.

They feel that the utterances disappear before they can sort them out.

Whereas, the words in a written text remain on the page where the reader can glance back at them or reexamine them thoroughly.

This frequently means that the students who are learning to listen cannot to keep up.

They are so busy working out the meaning of one part of what they hear that they miss the next part.

Or they simply ignore a whole section because they fail to sort it out quickly enough.

Either a way, they fail.

Another difficulty is that the listener is not always in a position to get the speaker to repeat what has been said.

And of course, repeats cannot be asked for when listening to the radio or watching television.

Choice for vocabulary is in the hands of the speaker, not the listener.

Although in some circumstances, it is possible to stop the speaker and ask for clarification.

Sometimes, listeners can get the meaning of a word from its context.

But very often for people listening to a foreign language, an unknown word can be like a suddenly dropped barrier causing them to stop and think about the meaning of the word, and thus making them miss the next part of the speech.

In listening, it really is the case of "he who hesitates is lost".

Indeed, determination to listen to what is coming and letting things that have passed go, rather than dwelling upon them, often gives surprisingly good result.

Speakers often say things more than once, or rephrase them, or another speaker echoes what has been said.

The listener, who has not stopped, to dwell on a half missed point, gets a second, or even third chance to fill the gap in the message he or she is receiving.

In fact, when we listen, we actually listen with a purpose.

Although it is sometimes necessary to get detailed and specific information on the subject.

It is, more often than not, quite enough for us to grasp the key words and the main points.

Students need to develop the skill of keeping up with the speaker, even being ahead of the speaker.

Even if this means letting parts which they have failed to sort out pass.

Professor H. H. Stern says that the good language learner is the one who can tolerate vagueness and incompleteness of knowledge.

This is especially true of good listeners.