Friday, January 23, 2015

Our Listening / Speaking Strategies

We have begun Listening Boot Camp!

What is a boot camp?

It is intensive training for new military recruits with a strict drill sergeant. Sometimes health clubs also offer boot camps for people who want to get in good shape fast. The personal trainer is there to motivate people to work hard for quick results. The personal trainer doesn't let you make excuses or take the easy way.

I am here to motivate you to awaken and strengthen different areas of your brains. We have agreed to close our bilingual dictionaries during listening lessons. The dictionaries can distract us from the main goal: improving listening and speaking skills.

This week we started building our tool box of L / S strategies. We can:

  • Guess an unknown word from context. (Remember the Shillybog!)
  • Listen for the gist.
  • Use repair strategies. (Communication is a two-way street.)
  • Talk around a word we do not know by explaining to the listener what we mean.
  • Tune into CONTENT words.
  • Practice good linking and prosody so your brain is prepared for the way native speakers really talk.
Here Rachel teaches you about consonant sound to vowel sound LINKING.

Watch this video about HOW TO GUESS A WORD FROM CONTEXT.  Here is another video about the same thing. There are many!

This is a great video on keys to improve your listening comprehension.

If you want to print the words to one of the 265 Short Stories on Mr. Zhang's Listening Page, call me over and we can do that together.


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