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Part 1, Listening Comprehension
SECTION A MINI-LECTURE
Understanding Academic Lectures
Good morning, everybody.
Now at the university you, as students, are often called on to perform many types of listening tasks: listening in a group discussion, listening to a teacher on a one-to-one basis, and listening to academic lectures.
So what I'm going to talk about today is what a listener needs to be able to do in order to comprehend an academic lecture efficiently.
OK. What do you need to do in order to understand the lecture?
Now there are four things that I'm going to talk about.
The first thing is that you need to be aware of all of the parts of the language that carry meaning.
You all know that words carry meaning.
So you've got to be aware of the vocabulary of the language, but there are some other features.
For one thing, you need to be aware of stress.
Let me give you an example.
"I went to the bar."
"I went to the bar."
It makes a difference.
In the second example, I'm stressing the fact that it was me and not someone else so that this means stress has some meaning.
Now the next thing you might want to listen for is intonation.
For example, if I say "He came." "He came?"
There are two different meanings.
One is a statement, the other one is a question.
And another thing you need to listen for is rhythm.
For instance, "Can you see, Mary?" VS "Can you see Mary?" Dadadadada. Dadadadada.
Those two mean something different.
In the first one, they are talking directly to Mary, while the second one means
"Can you see Mary over there?"
Now the next thing you must do when you listen is that you need to add information that the lecturer expects you to add.
All lecturers assume that they share some information with their audience and that their audience does not need them to explain every word.
And listeners have an ability to add this information due to two sources of information.
That is: 1) their knowledge of a particular subject; and 2) their knowledge or experience of the world.
So remember, listening is not a matter of just absorbing the speaker's words - the listener has to do more than that.
The listener is not a tape recorder, absorbing the speaker's words and putting them into his or her brain.
Rather, listening involves hearing the speaker's words and reinterpreting them, adding information if necessary.
So the meaning is not in the word alone, rather it is in the person who uses it or responds to it so that the second thing that a listener must do - add information that the lecturer assumes that they share.
OK. The third thing that a listener needs to do, and this is to me the most important thing of all, and that's to predict as you listen.
Now let me give you two reasons why you have to predict.
For one thing, if you predict it helps you overcome noise.
What do I mean by noise?
Maybe there's noise outside and you can't hear me.
Maybe you're in the back of the room and you can't hear all that well.
Maybe the microphone doesn't work.
Maybe there's noise inside your head.
By that I mean maybe you're thinking of something else.
And then all of a sudden, you'll remember "Oh, I've got to listen."
By being able to predict during the lecture, you can just keep listening to the lecture and not lose the idea of what's going on.
So predicting is important to help you overcome outside noise and inside noise.
And another reason that predicting is important is because it saves you time.
Now when you listen you need time to think about the information, relate it to old ideas, take notes, and if you're only keeping up with what I'm saying or what the lecturer's saying, you have no time to do that.
And I'll bet a lot of you are having that problem right now because it's so hard just to follow everything I'm saying that you don't have time to note down ideas.
So predicting saves you time.
If you can guess what I'm going to say, you're able to take notes, you're able to think, you have more time.
OK? And there are two types of predictions that you can make: predictions of content and predictions of organization.
Let me give you an example in terms of content.
If you hear the words "Because he loved to cook, his favorite room was…" what would you expect?
Kitchen. You can guess this because you know people cook in the kitchen.
OK? And you can also predict organization.
So if I was going to tell you a story, you expect me to tell you why the story is important, give you a setting for the story.
So you have expectations of what the speaker is going to talk about and how the speaker will organize his or her words.
Now let's come to the last thing a listener must do: the listener must evaluate as he or she is listening, decide what's important, what's not, decide how something relates to something else.
OK? There are again two reasons for this.
The first one is evaluating helps you to decide what to take notes about, what's important to write down, what's not important to write down.
And the second reason is that evaluating helps you to keep information.
Studies have shown that we retain more information if ideas are connected to one another rather than just individually remembered.
So for example, if I give you five ideas that are not related to one another, that's much more difficult to remember than five ideas that are related.
So you can see evaluating helps you to remember information better because it connects ideas to one another.
OK. From what I've said so far, you can see there's a lot involved in listening to lectures - language awareness, adding information, making predictions and evaluations.
I hope these will be useful to you in lecture comprehension.
