Three Monkeys - Improving listening understanding with L, LR and Shadowing reinforcement

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zenmonkey
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Three Monkeys - Improving listening understanding with L, LR and Shadowing reinforcement

Postby zenmonkey » Wed Sep 19, 2018 11:07 am

Recent discussion with a member about listening or rather understanding when listening had me thinking about the exercises I've done in the past to work on my listening comprehension. In the middle level of learning a language, I was frustrated by the advice of "just listen more" because after hours and hours of listening to the news, podcasts, etc - yes, with some improvements - I was still working in a very frustrated manner with material if I missed the meaning -- Well, too bad, the moment was lost and I wasn't going to get any reinforcement on the missed words.

Yesterday, I went back and looked at some notes and I'm posting these with the hope of a conversation. Feel free to add or critique. And to make this memorable I'm calling it Three Monkeys* - and I'm sure it is borrowed from somewhere, or not particularly new method, but I'm hoping it is useful now.

My starting point: "Listening only to audio, whether it is once or seven times is useful, but I am not getting a full use of the senses and really very little feedback on the words I miss. I need to try something different."

the-three-monkeys-cafe.jpg


So find short material with a transcript. Really only 2-5 minutes recordings is enough and leads to about 20 minutes of work. For German, the DW.de, Top Thema recordings are perfect.

Ears-only Monkey - Listen only
1) Listen once with only the audio, try to note words you don't get. Don't worry if you don't write down all the words you don't understand. Feel free to listen a second time, to get general meaning.

Eyes Monkey and Ears Monkey, together - Listen & Read
2) Listen to the recording while reading the text. Definitely note down the new vocabulary - look that up or pop it into deepl or google translate - something quick to get a sense of the word. If you want to create Anki cards, for vocabulary building fine, do it later, this is a listening exercise. The idea here is to capture the meaning of missed words and, know that you know what the text means, you should be able to catch almost all the global.

Bring in the Mouth Monkey - All the monkeys together
3) Listen to the recording while reading the text out loud. This is hard to do fluidly at the speed of a native speaker, it's ok if you make mistakes, not looking for perfection - we are working on a listening exercise. What repeating the text does is make you slow down and notice words and lexical constructs - You'll find a few words that you missed in step 2. "Hey, that one I didn't know. I missed writing it down." Again, look up meaning, if you added any words here. This reinforces the learning the sound and meaning of words (from producing them), from step 2.

4) Do a listen-only step again. Did it help? This is feedback, on the learning process. One should be able to conclude "yes, I got it now" or "no, this didn't work, I'm going to try something else for this section".

----
3b) I could see an optional shadowing "Ears and Mouth only - Shadowing" step but I haven't found it necessary for this type of exercise.

*there's some writing going on, but I don't have room in my zoo for a fourth monkey.

Thoughts, comments?
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Re: Three Monkeys - Improving listening understanding with L, LR and Shadowing reinforcement

Postby NoManches » Wed Sep 19, 2018 5:20 pm

I like this, and it is something I used to do (except I never thought to read aloud).

One thing I'd like to point out:

Often times I worked (this is a few years ago) with really advanced materials. With a transcript I was able to look up every single word and construction, and was able to make out every single word that was spoken. Sometimes I would listen to the same audio dozens and dozens of times (literally dozens of times). What I came to realize is that even using this method, some material was just too advanced for me given my level at the time. I could listen and understand words, but I felt like I wasn't truly understanding what was going on in general.

I think this is where the "just listen more" concept comes into play. I used to hear that a lot too and like you, it was super frustrating for me. I think the problem is that people don't often take the time to explain the results of "just listening more" other than that it will help your listening.

I think with a ton of listening, we eventually reach a point where we can hear things and automatically understand it without any extra effort on our part. Because our brain isn't so focused on understanding the meaning of so many new words that we just looked up, we can devote more energy to other parts of the listening process (such as listening and realizing that somebody says something with a sarcastic tone, for example).


I guess what I'm getting at is that you should work with material that isn't too advanced (although there is nothing wrong with occasionally working with really advanced materials), and that you can use the "just listen a lot" concept knowing that you are doing it for many reasons, one of those reasons being that you are training your brain to eventually hear things and not have to devote so much energy to decipher everything.


Great post, looking forward to read what others have to say.

Oh and by the way, if anybody knows the term or has more information on what I describe as "the brain being able to hear things and just understand it without having to use extra energy" , feel free to share that info, it's something I find very interesting. Maybe it is called "encoding" or "decoding"...not really sure, I'm just throwing around words that I thought I heard once to describe what I'm talking about.
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