Learning to Listen and Listening to Learn

General discussion about learning languages
DaveBee
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Re: Learning to Listen and Listening to Learn

Postby DaveBee » Mon Apr 17, 2017 9:35 am

reineke wrote:Dictation is similar to transcription. You'll find these exercises and plenty of vocabulary tips in Paul Nation's book about language learning (link below). In order to complete dictation or transcription exercises the learner needs to be able to capture large language chunks in his working memory and render them word by word in writing. Needless to say, in order to do that the learner needs to be able to extricate words from a stream of speech. If we were to try boosting this process, we could take a look at specific approaches, tools, or adapted materials.

HPVT - High Variability Phonetic Training

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=328

Slowed down speech - an umbrella term...

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... own+speech

SRS?

Paul Nation's page. Includes a free book:
What you need to know to learn a foreign language.The book includes some common sense advice and suggestions.
http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/about/staff/paul-nation
I've just skimmed through Mr Nation's book, thanks for the link.

He seems to be quite keen on 1. flash cards, 2. repetition.

The repetition angle is a one I'm going to pursue. I've just finished reading Pride and Prejudice, after watching the (dubbed) mini-series, so the audio-book is now at the top of my to-do list! :-)
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aaleks
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Re: Learning to Listen and Listening to Learn

Postby aaleks » Mon Apr 17, 2017 11:05 am

Arnaud wrote:
Ani wrote:
DaveBee wrote:Dictation seems to be a significant part of french children's french language education. Wouldn't that be a practical method for self-study of listening skills?


In my time, the dictations were not prepared in advance: it was "today, dictation: open your notebook and write...", and you wrote during 1/4 hour.

In Russia, when I was a kid, we usually were writing a dictation during a whole lesson (about 40-45 min).
And, yes, the purpose of it was to check orthography and punctuation.

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Beside dictations, there was also such thing as "Изложение". I don’t know how it should be called in English, maybe a narration. It looked like this: some story had been read three times by a teacher and after that we were supposed to write down the story (what we had memorized) as precisely as possible. I don’t sure if it might somehow help with listening, but who knows.
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reineke
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Re: Learning to Listen and Listening to Learn

Postby reineke » Fri Aug 25, 2017 4:13 pm

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Last edited by reineke on Fri Dec 27, 2019 3:30 am, edited 2 times in total.
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DaveBee
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Re: Learning to Listen and Listening to Learn

Postby DaveBee » Mon Sep 11, 2017 11:11 pm

aaleks wrote:Beside dictations, there was also such thing as "Изложение". I don’t know how it should be called in English, maybe a narration. It looked like this: some story had been read three times by a teacher and after that we were supposed to write down the story (what we had memorized) as precisely as possible. I don’t sure if it might somehow help with listening, but who knows.
I've just come across an article on dictation [PDF]. The task you describe seems to fall under the 'dicto-comp' (Dictation and Composition) heading, intended to improve writing skill.
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Re: Learning to Listen and Listening to Learn

Postby Serpent » Tue Sep 12, 2017 2:53 am

We called it reproduction :)
A regular one is where you just reproduce the text. Usually the first time we would listen without being allowed to write (making notes was ok), the second time we tried to write down the whole thing and the third was for double-checking I think? In high school we also did "reproduction with an element of composition" meaning that we had to add 1-2 paragraphs, generally expressing our own opinion. Basically for a reproduction it's totally fine if your text is identical to the original one, but obviously adding that element of composition makes it more challenging.

BTW, in his final year my cousin had to write a composition in English about their then-upcoming composition/reproducton-based Russian exam. So meta :mrgreen: Although of course it's useful to be able to talk about your study process.
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Re: Learning to Listen and Listening to Learn

Postby PeterMollenburg » Tue Sep 12, 2017 10:35 am

thanks for sharing reineke. The information you've provided leaves me feeling confident about the processes i've followed with learning French, in that the decoding phase was important for me, and massive while getting all the details. It was a lengthy, detailed, analytical, fastidiously perfectionist stage that i've carried through to intermediate/advanced levels (but toned back what i'm already confident with). Also that reading aloud, as I suspected is (according to the info. you've provided) a positive thing for a number of reasons. ;)
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Re: Learning to Listen and Listening to Learn

Postby reineke » Sun Feb 11, 2018 5:18 pm

Memory is fleeting.
Last edited by reineke on Wed Mar 13, 2019 4:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Learning to Listen and Listening to Learn

Postby reineke » Sat Feb 24, 2018 8:44 pm

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Last edited by reineke on Fri Dec 27, 2019 3:31 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Learning to Listen and Listening to Learn

Postby reineke » Wed Mar 14, 2018 8:15 pm

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Last edited by reineke on Fri Dec 27, 2019 3:32 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Learning to Listen and Listening to Learn

Postby Iversen » Thu Mar 15, 2018 7:34 pm

aaleks wrote:Beside dictations, there was also such thing as "Изложение". I don’t know how it should be called in English, maybe a narration. It looked like this: some story had been read three times by a teacher and after that we were supposed to write down the story (what we had memorized) as precisely as possible. I don’t sure if it might somehow help with listening, but who knows.


I sound exactly like the 'genfortælling' (literally 're-telling') we had in Danish schools in my childhood, except that the original version wasn't repeated three times - we could also just be told to read it ourselves. The idea was that we then knew what to rite about, and all the necessary words should be known - not a bad idea, but I have always preferred making up my own stories.

reineke wrote:Your brain can't swipe and hear at the same time, scans show
A new study shows that people who are focused on visual tasks actually can’t hear what's going on around them because hearing and vision tap the same brain regions, according to a report published Tuesday in the Journal of Neuroscience.
The researchers have dubbed this hearing deficit: inattentional deafness.
Lavie and her colleagues suspected that the brain might have problems multitasking when it was given a visual task that required concentration."


In this moment I'm listening to the mightly Faust Symphony of Liszt Ferenc, and I'm writing this comment in English, and once in a while I look at the television where the two new Mythbusters try to blow up something. And just a few minutes ago I was solving a sudoku in my kitchen while eating a pear and listening to Faust.

I do believe the researchers who tell me that true multitasking at the conscious level is impossible, but they always forget to tell the other side of the story, namely that instead of sustaining a real double or triple focus we do something different: we slice time into minute segments and switch our attention between our competing tasks. As long as we feel a continuity between each occurrence of each task we may think we are multitasking - and in a sense we are. The thing that can cause problems in this process is if one task becomes so difficult that we can't leave it and expect just to continue when we return. Even having to concentrate on one specific task for a few seconds means that we lose the perceived continuity within the other tasks. Therefore it was actually misleading when for instance the old Mythbuster teams tested whether people can multitask by serving them difficult calculating or reasoning problems per telephone while they drove a car - and of course they couldn't. But give them simple and less intrusive tasks, then the result would almost certainly be different.

Another way of shaking the perception of multitasking is if the tasks interfere, and here I'm fairly sure that my listening to music is disturbs my writing less than it would be to listen to someone speaking to me - especially if I had to write in weak language or about a difficult subject.
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