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Does audio input improve oral skills ? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Bolkonsky Diglot Newbie France Joined 5209 days ago 25 posts - 27 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: German, Swedish | Message 1 of 15 07 February 2011 at 9:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hey everyone,
First I must beg your pardon if this question has already been mentioned and also for my English ability. Well, living in France I don't have a lot of opportunity to practice my oral skills in both English and Swedish. I try to listen radio as munch as possible but I'm actually wondering if it really helps for oral. I mean, I know that it contributes to improve it but is it really enough to develop an efficient ability to hold a conversation ? Are listening skills and oral skills closely related ? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5386 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 2 of 15 07 February 2011 at 9:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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IMHO, only oral helps oral. If you can't practice with actual partners, do anything you can to foster internal monologues in the languages in question.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6016 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 3 of 15 07 February 2011 at 10:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've just come from a meeting where I understood every word said to me, but I had to answer in English.
Listening helps, but listening alone is not enough. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| TerryW Senior Member United States Joined 6362 days ago 370 posts - 783 votes Speaks: English* | Message 4 of 15 07 February 2011 at 11:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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Reading, writing, speaking, and understanding spoken are 4 different skills, with a little bit of overlap. To get good in any one of them, you have to practice it.
If someone gave you lessons on how to play guitar for an hour a day every day for a year, including giving you sheet music that showed how to play songs note-for-note and chord-for-chord, but you never once picked up the guitar yourself to practice, do you think you'd be able to play? Hint: No. ;-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5698 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 5 of 15 07 February 2011 at 11:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think "speaking" isn't actually one skill in itself, but rather the combination of a few skills. From experience, I can say that lots of audio input (as long as you're actually paying attention to it, and ideally memorizing it) does indeed help with certain aspects of speaking, i.e.:
- accent - the "melody" of the language - confidence in the sounds (this, to me, is something slightly different from a good accent; others may disagree) One thing that lots of audio has not really helped me with is fluid production, i.e. stringing words together naturally and speaking at a normal pace. A lot of people say that television is more helpful than radio, because then you have physical cues (topic, picture, facial expressions, etc.) to help you make the correct associations with the words. Personally, I don't have the patience for news broadcasts or the time to watch a lot of movies in my target language, so what works the best for me is cheesy soap-opera type TV shows. Plus, it seems to me that TV shows often have more dialogue than films do. When you see the circumstances in which a particular character says certain words – and then the reaction they get to those words – you can learn very effectively, because you're bypassing translation and just going directly from oral expression to understanding meaning. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Andrew C Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom naturalarabic.com Joined 5195 days ago 205 posts - 350 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written) | Message 6 of 15 07 February 2011 at 11:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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Before you know what to say you have to hear or read it first - so in that sense listening helps your speaking a lot. And if you want conversational language, then listening to conversations would be better than say the news.
Listening will also help you understand at least half a conversation! I suspect that if your listening is perfect, then as soon as you get the opportunity to speak, it will come quite quickly. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5340 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 7 of 15 07 February 2011 at 11:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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I actually think speaking and listening overlap quite a lot. Whenever we're speaking or writing we're basically reproducing words, phrases and grammar constructions that we've heard used a thousand times before by others, that's the only reason we even know how to use them. If you've heard a term fifty times on the radio one day, it will pop into your head quite easily during a conversation the next day. I've been listening to a lot of French for the last several months and I've noticed improvements in my accent, vocabulary and grammar, even though I've made no conscious effort to improve my speaking.
However, I agree with Cainntear that listening is not enough. It will give you the materials to work with but then you need to know how to use and combine them to fluently phrase your own thoughts and that takes practice. Edited by ReneeMona on 07 February 2011 at 11:57pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6016 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 8 of 15 08 February 2011 at 12:00am | IP Logged | ||
My firm belief is that we can improve our speaking ability by listening only by comparing what we hear to what we say, so continued listening is helpful when we continue to speak and therefore modify our own speech bit by bit. Progression is a cycle of "saying it better leading" to "hearing it better", and "hearing it better" leading to "saying it better", and so on. It's easier for the brain to make small adjustments than big ones, so the role of conscious study is to get us "close enough" that the brain can fill in the gaps. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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