EFS 693B - STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Listening and Communication

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EFS 693B
Week 7a Notes
 

CLASS OBJECTIVES

• Next scene from Groundhog Day

• Groundhog Day dictation results

• Activities for listening that improve processing abilities

• Discuss your project with others

• Listening to movies--Groundhog Day

I. Groundhog Day, Scene 2: 1) with subtitles; 2) without subtitles;

II. Groundhog Day dictation results

III. Reminder--Part III: The last two weeks we have talked about activities for improving comprehension and activities for building language knowledge. This week we'll discuss activities for improving language processing.

First, processing of some sort is happening all the time: your brain is processing when you simply listen for meaning, and it's processing when you pick out a key word from a sentence you otherwise don't understand, or notice a single new word in a sentence you otherwise understand fully. We use "processing" to mean something different here--the ability to link the forms (parts of words, whole words, phrases, and sentences) to the meaning rapidly, accurately, and ultimately with limited conscious effort (such as translation), as you do when you listen in your native language. Specifically, we are looking for listening activities that increase speed, improve accuracy, and build capacity. Let's look at each one of these individually.

Increasing speed is important because 1) it allows you to comprehend faster speech and 2) it frees cognitive resources from having to concentrate so hard on the language forms that the meaning is hard to grasp, interpret, and retain. Speed of phonological processing means that when you hear a string of English sounds you can rapidly link it to a word or phrase, find the boundaries, and reconstruct reduced forms. Speed of lexical access means how quickly you can get the meaning when hearing a word. Speed of parsing means how fast you can create the grammatical structure of a sentence, recognizing which words go together in phrases and picking up on relations like tense. Finally, an important part of speed is anticipation—the ability to predict the next word or phrase based on what you’ve already heard and the context.

Processing for accuracy means catching all of what the speaker said and possibly even what the speaker didn’t seem to say but what grammatically must be there. This includes correct word forms (e.g. present vs. presence), endings (lift vs. lifts), grammatical words (articles, prepositions, and conjunctions), word order, word boundaries, full versions of reduced forms. It also means using meaning and context to select the most likely words from alternatives (e.g. “tire” vs. “tie are” vs. “tie our” in “tie our present to the distant past”). Accuracy can also involve getting relatively accurate forms for unknown words so that they can be identified correctly.

Capacity refers to how much language you can hold in working memory. This is important both for comprehending longer sentences and for dealing with some of the accuracy issues mentioned previously. Building capacity doesn’t really refer to increasing memory so that you can recall a larger number of items (the general target for humans is 7 +/- 2 (a range of 5 to 9 unrelated items)). It really refers to “chunking”—assembling items into larger units and then remembering the units. For example, the 10-digit phone number 816-523-6449 would probably be hard to recall on just one hearing, while 650-725-1557 might be much easier because “650” is a known area code and “723” is  common Stanford prefix. You can do the same thing with words and phrases, and it appears that this ability can improve with practice.

Done correctly, dictation can be used to improve processing in all of these areas. Dictation typically works best with relatively easy, familiar material, though it can also sometimes be a way to focus attention on more challenging material. Other aspects of processing practice are to work with material that has challenging accents or that is faster than you can easily handle. In both cases, listening while simultaneously reading a script at least one time through can be helpful for seeing what's actually there. Similarly, the play speed control on media players may allow you to slow a segment down so that you buy more processing time and more difficult parts become easier to notice.

Finally, last week we discussed the concepts of intensive, semi-intensive, and extensive listening. I encourage you to engage in extensive listening regularly throughout the week in addition to the semi-intensive and intensive work you do for the class and independent study. Remember that semi-intensive differs from extensive in 1) the fact that at least one of the purposes is to improve some aspect of language skill or knowledge and 2) the degree of concentration and interaction with the material. Listening straight through without stopping, rewinding, reflecting, etc. and then moving on to other material is extensive listening and is not a part of the minimum for the independent project.

IV. Homework: impressions of www.ted.com; http://www.edict.com.hk/TextAnalyser/wordlists.htm; www.englishbaby.com

What learning or practice objectives is each associated with?

V. Practicing vocabulary: www.flashcarddb.com; (see also www.ichi2.net/anki; www.wordchamp.com). Concept of spaced repetition: Leitner system --- http://flashcarddb.com/leitner

VI. Movie support materials:

www.script-o-rama.com has many movie transcripts: you can also try putting the movie title plus "transcript" into Google

www.learnenglishfeelgood.com/eslvideo/index.html has examples of movie clips--scenes from movies--and "trailers"--advertisements that preview scenes from the movie to interest you in watching it. Includes comprehension questions but no transcripts.

www.eslnotes.com/ has movie guides for a number of good films. It has a summary of the movie and extensive vocabulary support

VIII. Groundhog Day continued

NOTE ROOM CHANGES: Makeup classes will be Thursday 3:15-4:30 in 50-52H and Friday 9:00-10:15 in 160-322.

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Homework (for next week, not next class on Thursday/Friday):

1) This week the assignment is to work on your project every day for at least 20-30 minutes, for a minimum of 3 hours total. Email your report (available here) to efs@stanford.edu by Monday May 17 at 8:00 PM (Tuesday class) or Tuesday May 18 at 8:00 PM (Wednesday class). Please do not mail it before the due date so that you can complete an entire 7-day week: be sure to start it the day of your class. Set a schedule in advance so that you don't miss a day.

2) Explore www.flashcarddb.com. Put in at least 20 words from your independent project work and/or from our class lists, divided into two, 10-word lessons. Practice these on at least two different days. Come prepared to discuss your experience. Spend a few minutes exploring the other two sites and see if either of them seems better for your purposes: www.ichi2.net/anki; www.wordchamp.com

3) Go to www.stanford.edu/dept/lc/efs/FlashACE/. Go through FlashACE Intermediate Lessons 1, 3, 4, and 5 (skip Lesson 2 for now--it has several errors). Do them on four different days. Listen first for comprehension. Then, for each lesson, try to do dictation on at least three items. Notice what you have to listen to most closely and any mistakes you make--come prepared to discuss your experience. Do not continue to FlashACE Advanced--we'll do it in later weeks. (Note: If you already did this for 693A, you've probably forgotten most of the individual items, so try it again, or concentrate on the dictations).