Listening Diary FAQ

What is a listening diary?

For each entry you need to1. List the listening item, the date and diary

entry number. 2. Rank the listening task in term of the

level of difficulty. (1-5 )3. Give a summary.4. List your questions and if possible try to

find answers.5. Share your reflection.

Components of Diary

• Summary Briefly summarize the listening task in your own language, such as the type of listening task, the topic and the relationship of the speakers. Use the questions in “Think about the context” as a guide.

• QuestionsRecord the words, phrases or passage that you have trouble understanding, and try to explain why. Is it because you are not familiar with the topic, the speaker’s accent or some particular expression? We will try to answer your questions, but give it a try yourself.

• ReflectionReflection is critical in the sense that you make sense of this listening

experience. This section could be closely related to the questions you list above. One of the ways that you can improve your English is by asking yourself questions and answer your own questions. Moreover, it’s a chance for you to make connection between the foreign culture and the local culture.• Travel: BBC Beyond the Postcard: Edinburgh : Compare the loyalty of

John Gray’s dog to a loyal dog in a Taiwanese legend

How to keep a listening diary?

• You could write your listening diary before you start the listening, in the process of the listening and of course after you complete the listening.

• For pre-listening, before you actually start to play the listening task, stop for a couple minutes and try to list anything you think related to the topic. Yes, do some brainstorming would prepare you for the possible developments.

• During the process of listening, jot down the main idea:– What is the most important message? – You could also take notes to check how much you get from the

task. – Please note any difficulty you meet in understanding the

message. Is it the main ideas or some particular details?

Learner Supports

• A channel for direct communication between you and the teacher, so that we understand individual differences better.

• A space to increase interaction among peers, you are encouraged to post questions or share ideas to the discussion board.

Why do you need to keep a listening diary?

• To form a habit of listening. • To build a personal listening record with a collection of

interested topics.• To help you play a more interactive role in the process

of critical listening.• To demonstrate your listening strategies when

encountering difficult materials.• To record your questions for the teacher and the TA to

response to.• To grow more awareness in predicting, inferring, and

visualizing the setting, speakers and the scenario.

Summary

• The fourth speaker, MaryEllen, stalled a webpage, offering on-line group class and individual training, especially for her training and American pronunciation students. She hopes students can improve their pronunciation and they can work together. She is good at Spanish. MaryEllen Welton’s introduction is focus on her proficiency and the purpose of her webpage.

• She did not talk about her hobbies and education, just only talking about her specialized field and the advantage of this webpage. From this way, we can different self-introduction styles. We can change different introductions, not just share your hobbies and education, so I think the third and the four are better to learn.

• This topic talks about an old town’s history. And it introduces the feature of this old town, like traditional names and small streets. This old town is important because there was a document signed here. On the other hand, it mentions a faithful dog. The dog kept watch a farmer’s grave for fourteen years. Local people were so impressed by this loyalty dog.

On listening items

• “I feel that some self-instruction is difficult because of those place names I don’t know.”

• “I feel that this self-introduction is too formal, just like a biography, writing, which is not necessary when making an introduction.”

• For the first chapter, I think it is easy to understand. Through Small Talk on the Bus this listening part, I think it is not necessity to start talking with introducing your name or where you’re from. Having different situations, we start our conversation differently.

On listening process

• [On Art’s Self-Intro]:The speaker’s speed is ok, but sometime the connection between words would still confuse me. Some word and phrase like draftsman and stain glass projects make me confused. Some of them sound like two words but actually it is one word.

• [On small talk on bus]:In my opinions, it was fast between their conversation, and they seem skipped some consonants in sentences so that I can’t hear clearly. They also connected words by juncture that it was more difficult to understand what they said.

Example from Fairy Tales

• By the way, the ending of the story Little Red Ridinghood in this exercise was not the same as I’ve known. In my memory the ending was that after the evil wolf gobbled them he slept deeply in grandma’s bed. A moment later, a hunter came and found this tragedy, so he cut open the wolf’s belly and saved the grandma and Little Red Ridinghood’s life. They worked together to put many rocks into wolf’s belly and sewed up it again. After a while the wolf got up and felt thirsty to died, so he went to the river to got some water. However, the belly with hundreds rocks in it was so heavy that the wolf fell into the river and died as well.

Simple Questions

• I had a question that in the second one news, Kids’ café, and they are students who studied in the high school. Why called them “kids”? Didn’t “kids” mean “children”? This is my question.

• 為什麼標題中的 ” The Princess and the Pea” 中的 Princess 和 Pea 的字首都要大寫呢 ?

• Pre-listening strategy: • When I first saw the topic of this story, the

Princess and the Pea. I felt strange and thought that what this story is? Therefore I got lots of interests on this story and wanted to know what will happen!!

Make Connection with the Past Experience

• This interesting article makes me recall my experience in my childhood. When I was about 10 years old, I have gone to Canada with my family. We went to Canada every summer vacation to attend lots of summer camps and learned English too. One day, we went to our cousin’s home and my cousin and I were very bored so we started to use some paper to make some rings and necklaces. We also made some lemonade. In the end, we took these handcrafts on the street on the community and began to sell them. Ha! You can imagine the result that we didn’t sell anything. I think it is a very childish behavior but interesting!!

Interaction with TA

• Student: I like to listen to the music. My favorite song lately is “Fix you” from Cold Play.

• TA: I think it’s really not like the traditional Christmas songs we know. It has some elements of old-school rock music. Its energy and positive meanings have something to do with the condition of 70s, in which the song was made. Here you can view the video of the whole song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niIJ9Yb-xwQ