Unit 5 partIV

UNIT 5

Part IV

Letting Things Go —Speed and V ocabulary

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 re-examine them thoroughly. This frequently means that students who are learning to listen cannot 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 all out quickly enough. Either 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 of 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 a 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 results. 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.

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.

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