EFS 693B - STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Advanced Listening and Vocabulary Development

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EFS 693B: Final Comments from the Winter 2012 Students

1. What three websites have you found most useful this quarter? (e.g., ecorner, studentnews…)

·         Ted, Scientific American, Friends transcription website 

·         http://mppc.org; http://www.ted.com/; http://edition.cnn.com/US/studentnews/quick.guide/archive/index.html

·         E-corner,   www.lextutor.ca/vp/bnc, Ted are excellent. The reason for choosing e-corner is that I am particularly interested in that topic, so I’m not sure that other students are also interested in. I think Ted is generally suitable for everybody. Finally, lextutor website is excellent to know whether new words are worth remembering

·         CNN studentnews, TEDtalks and ecorners are best for me.

·         TED, ESL Lab, E Corner

·         TED, pbs news, and ecorner

·         http://www.ted.com; www.stanford.edu/dept/lc/efs/FlashACE/; http://www.pbs.org/newshour/

·         Ecorner, pbsnews, hulu

·         NewsHours, EnglishBaby, TED.

·         English, Baby; PBSNewshour; TED

·         Ecorner, TED, and http://www.lextutor.ca/

·         PBS news and the TED.com

·         Studentnews, pbs, Ted

·         Studentnews, TED, English baby (for slang)

·         PBS news hours, ecorner, google advanced video search

·         Ted, E-corner, PBS

·         E-corner, ted-talk, and PBS

2. What three strategies/techniques (parts of procedures) have you found most useful this quarter? (e.g., adjusting the speed, dictation...)

·         Adjusting the speed/ Go through the main description of the material first/ Short period dictation  

·         Breaking long materials into shorter parts; 2) Listening to the parts that were hard to understand more and did oral & normal dictation for them. Then check the transcript or captions if available; 3) Adjusting the speed if it is really difficult to understand

·         Dictation is helpful to figure out which part I misunderstand, but dictation is usually tedious, so I tried to mumble the same sentences that lecturers said almost simultaneously. It could be a good compromise.

·         Most of time rewind is enough, dictation is good for improving processing and capacity, and then is adjusting speed.

·         Dictation, taking brief notes during listening, repeat or rephrase the content by speaking.

·         Listen again after looking at the subtitle, dictation, pick up the words and phrases from listening materials

·         Do summary, do dictation, and do series of the same speaker

·         Repeat after speaker, check captions only when necessary, watch difficult part again.

·         Do oral dictation;  Prepare with background reading

·         Dictation; Intentional usage of “intensive”, “semi-intensive” and “non-intensive” listening;

·         Flashcard DB

·         Try to do some dictation. No need to write down every word, but write those important one. Then use these words to reflect the content of the lecture before begin listening for the second time. This will improve your understanding in the second time.

·         Dictation, Reading aloud, and Watching TV shows with transcripts.

·         Dictation, All techniques of listening to movies, lextutor for vocabulary development, flashace for improving comprehension

·         Semi-intensive listening, Dictation, Switch (on/off) the subtitles.

·         Repeat the difficult parts several times, dictation,  adjust the speed

·         Dictation; Search some background information beforehand; Not to rely on the subtitle too much

·         Slowing down for hard material; oral repetition; learn vocabulary first before listening to the material (We can do this by copying the transcript into the statistical website, and learn 4000 or 5000-level above words before listening).

3. What advice do you have for a student just starting this course?

·         I agree that it’s better to schedule fixed time for listening every day or week, don’t wait until you think you have time for it.   

·         Making an everyday schedule for spending time on listening to English; 2) Starting from interesting and relatively short materials to challenging and long materials

·         Choose interesting and funny materials and enjoy them.

·         First of all improve process speed and capacity is important, dictation helps the most.

·         Choose what is close to your life

·         Keep working on following the same topic for weeks or working on the same speaker for weeks really helps a lot.

·         Spend more time on this course. It’s better to practice everyday. The result you achieve will be in direct proportion to the effort you apply.

·         Try something easy (like Obama speech and documentary without too many high level words)

·         I will strongly recommend they start to use EnglishBaby, since it has important vocabulary list and background reading before the listening practice, and also the transcript afterwards, from which they can complete the necessary steps within one website. This would very helpful for those just start and have no idea how to do it efficiently.

·         Think seriously about building vocabulary. Selection of vocabulary is also important.

·         Following the theme of the week and manage to work every day. No matter how busy you are, try at least 10 mins.

·         Try to make deliberate listening a daily practice.

·         Making very good plan, Trying both short/intensive materials and (very) long talks, Taking effort on managing the word list in a good shape from the very beginning

·         A large vocabulary will help you a lot in understand the listening materials So keep building up your vocabulary..

·         This course really teaches a good methodology to learn English. What you need to do is just practice more using the method learnt on class.

·         Divide listening training into short sessions and do it every day; learn vocabulary first before listening to the material.