|
 |
Does audio input improve oral skills ? | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5435 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 9 of 15 08 February 2011 at 5:11am | IP Logged | ||
|
Everybody agrees that listening to comprehensible input is good in a general sense. How does that translate into making one a better speaker is another question. I would like to make the distinction between two kinds of audio material. First, there is what I call ephemeral audio material such as radio and and television broadcasts that one never hears again. Then there is recorded material such as DVD's, songs, audiobooks and the wealth of material on the internet that one can listen to over an over again.
I'll deal quickly with the first category. Certainly interesting for general content and becoming familiar with the sounds of the language but not very effective for speaking purposes. The real interesting stuff is the material that can be listened to repeatedly. To be very brief, I think that listening over and over to the right materials and even learning some by heart can do wonders. By listening I mean what some people call active listening: parse the various grammatical components; identify idioms, look up words in the dictionary, take note of interesting modes of expression, etc. If you do this with a wide range of materials, you will spontaneously develop a sense of word frequency; certain things keep coming back. This will certainly translate into an enhanced ability to speak. This is not to say that speaking fluently will happen just by dint of listening. I'm simply suggesting that extensive active listening is conducive to internalizing the vocabulary and grammatical patterns that we can in turn try to use in our own speech. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| polyglHot Pentaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5071 days ago 173 posts - 229 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, German, Spanish, Indonesian Studies: Russian | Message 10 of 15 08 February 2011 at 8:27am | IP Logged | ||
|
If you are intelligent enough, it's sufficient just to listen to the radio and have
conversations with yourself in your head. Of course this works best if you are a loner and have no French friends, sit alone in your room deciphering ABBA songs a lot etc.... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6708 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 15 08 February 2011 at 10:53am | IP Logged | ||
|
I wouldn't say that radio and other ephemeral material are totally irrelevant - just like reading novels isn't totally irrelevant even though you only read each novel once. But even a passive activity can be performed in a more or less passive way, and even ephemeral material can be used to listen attentively for speech patterns, intonations and things like that that are present continuously.
The situation is much worse in the case of grammatical phenomena or expressions that come once and then are gone forever. There you must have materials that you can return to OR an overwhelming amount of materials to listen to. But the main purpose of listening to ephemeral materials is to teach you to understand things on the fly, not to teach you specific things about a language. And although the ability to understand things on the fly is practical if you want to participate in discussions with native speakers, it can only be a good background for becoming active yourself - it doesn't take you all the way. Edited by Iversen on 08 February 2011 at 1:58pm 3 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 12 of 15 08 February 2011 at 10:59am | IP Logged | ||
That's not question of intelligence, it's about your personality. There's plenty of very intelligent people who don't have conversations in their heads. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| polyglHot Pentaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5071 days ago 173 posts - 229 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, German, Spanish, Indonesian Studies: Russian | Message 13 of 15 08 February 2011 at 12:28pm | IP Logged | ||
|
That's not what I meant.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5435 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 14 of 15 08 February 2011 at 1:52pm | IP Logged | ||
I hope I didn't convey the idea that listening to ephemeral audio is totally irrelevant. As I said, it's good for general content, and I certainly think one can pick up grammar and vocabulary by listening to anything. The problem, as we all know, is that things go by so quickly that it is often difficult to write down or take note of what was said. And there is no way of checking if one has correctly understood what was said. Compare this to a podcast or a Youtube clip where you can go over the recording again and again until you're really sure of what you're hearing. Or even have a native speaker listen to something that you have difficulty making out. On this last point, I would like to point out that one has to be especially careful with interviews and conversations because native speakers will do things like not complete sentences, make "mistakes" and correct themselves and change a grammatical construction in mid-sentence. We do this all the time in our own languages. The problem for us learners is that it is hard to know what is right and wrong. I remember puzzling over a word is a Spanish recording for days until a native speaker told me that the speaker in the recording had simply made a mistake and then corrected himself immediately. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5313 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 15 of 15 08 February 2011 at 11:55pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Here in Hong Kong we have many immigrants. Many people understand their parents' or grandparents' dialect perfectly, but can't speak it at all. I recently asked two of my friends why. They said they don't know which word to use and what order to put the words in. Another friend tried to teach me some Shanghainese, the language which his MOTHER spoke to him but which he doesn't speak himself, and I noticed he often wasn't sure of the pronunciation of individual words.
So I believe that listening doesn't help speaking much. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
If you wish to post a reply to this topic you must first login. If you are not already registered you must first register
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
