Some Strategies for Listening to Recordings
Listening is an excellent way to increase your understanding of another language. As you listen to an audio or video recording, you can really develop your comprehension of the spoken language as well as your speaking fluency.
Use any accompanying text or images to help you get ready to listen. Is there a short text about the author, or the actors? Can you identify the main subject from the title?
If there is a written transcript of the listening passage, be ready to use it to your full advantage. If you can listen and read at the same time, you will understand a lot more, and it is likely that you will improve your listening skills at the same time that you improve your reading skills.
Pay attention to the context. Use contextual clues to help you become an intelligent guesser. For example, if you are listening to a sports broadcast, you know from experience in your own language what is likely to be said, at least in general terms.
Listen to the recorded passage more than once. Replay any parts that are hard for you to understand. Try to guess the gist or general meaning by listening for what you know and recognize. Then listen again and confirm the gist by adding more details.
Listen for the main idea or theme. Can you summarize in one sentence what the listening passage is “about”? And can you retell what the passage had to say?
Listen for the “orientation” of the recording. This means: Who is speaking? Is there one speaker or several? Where are they? Can you hear any background noises, such as car engines or paper rustling, or birds twittering? This approach helps you guess at what they might talk about, or what they might not talk about.
Please let me know if you try out some of these strategies, and what works for you. Just leave a comment below.
Let’s Exchange Our Opinions!
Hello, guys! Now you are ready to make a new step forward in your English Learning Program -- start presenting your thoughts in writing! |
Reading: The Story of An Hour (Chopin)
Hello everyone!
I've made a quick audio recording of the short short story by Kate Chopin that you
will be reading. In my experience, it's easier to understand something in another
language if you have a way to connect the text with the way it sounds.
This is an MP3 file. Please let me know if you think this helps.
Occupied… this week
A good deal has happened this week with the Occupied movement. I'm
posting some links so you can pick and choose what you want to read more about. When I chose to follow this story, almost two months ago, I couldn't have imagined how important it would become. You will see (I hope) what a constitutional challenge this is, especially to the Bill of Rights.
Police Crackdowns on Occupy Protests from Oakland to New York Herald the "New Military Urbanism"
Top Aide to Oakland Mayor Resigns over Occupy Raid:
Mayors, Police Are Doing Wall Street's Business
Occupy Wall Street Evicted in Late Night Raid; Lawyers Secure Injunction to Reopen Zuccotti Park
After Zuccotti: What Now for Occupy Wall Street?
Almost two months to the day since anti-Wall Street protesters occupied Zuccotti Park, Mike Bloomberg finally did what he’s clearly been aching to do all along: cleared them the heck out of there. Perhaps encouraged by similar actions in Oakland and Portland, the Mayor unleashed the N.Y.P.D.’s riot squad in the dead of night, first taking care to cordon off the area from prying news cameras.
As the sun came on yet another balmy mid-November day, two questions arose: Were the protesters gone for keeps? And where would the Occupy Wall Street movement go from here?
As of noon, the first question was shrouded in confusion. A few hours earlier, responding to a request from the National Lawyers Guild, Justice Lucy Billings, who sits on the State Supreme Court, had issued atemporary restraining order preventing the city from enforcing park rules, such as “no tents,” on the protesters, and ordering the city, the Mayor, the police department, and Brookfield Properties to show cause for their actions. Of course, the N.Y.P.D. had already enforced these rules, as evidenced by this A.P. footage, which shows sanitation workers filling garbage trucks with tents, tarps, and other detritus from the encampment.
Justice Billings set a hearing for later in the day, and Mayor Bloomberg, speaking at a press conference in which he attempted to justify his actions by saying the protesters had deprived other New Yorkers of the right to use the park and created a health hazard, said the city would fight her restraining order. A few dozen protesters were allowed back into the park, minus tents, only to be turfed out again pending the court hearing. Meanwhile, other protesters had marched uptown and occupied a lot at Canal and Sixth Avenue that is owned by Trinity Church.
The larger question, about the future of Occupy Wall Street, won’t be answered today or tomorrow. If the Mayor and the editorial page of the New York Post think the protests will simply fade away, they are deluded. In its short life, O.W.S. has gone from a local sideshow to a national movement, with offshoots in hundreds of towns and cities. Whatever happens next, it has already changed the terms of the political debate, putting rising inequality front and center, which is where it should have been for years.
Still, O.W.S. has to make some decisions about its future. At its heart, there has always been an incipient tension between aims (reducing inequality and reinvigorating an ossified political system) and means (occupying urban real estate). Now that its encampments in many cities have been broken up, and with winter coming on, the movement needs to confront this tension and, if not resolve it, at least come up with a way to negotiate it over the next few months.
Some opportunistic outsiders, such as Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, are keen to seize upon O.W.S. as a vehicle to create a new progressive movement, with its own political candidates and party platform. In a widely circulated piece in Sunday’s Times, Sachs argued that the success of O.W.S. heralds a sea change in American politics. “A new generation of leaders is just getting started,” Sachs wrote. “The new progressive age has begun.” Sachs even suggested a snappy platform: “Tax the rich, end the wars and restore honest and effective government for all.”
If only it were that easy to transform American politics. As anybody knows who has spent time in Zuccotti Park and sat through one of the “General Assemblies,” it is tough for the organizers of the protest to get anything done, let alone set up a new political party. With unanimous support required for new initiatives or significant expenditures, some recent assemblies have degenerated into shouting matches, and last week a dissident group set up its own alternative assembly.
Given the internal fissures that were developing, it could conceivably turn out that Bloomberg has done O.W.S. a favor. In some ways, the movement has already outgrown Zuccotti Park. It now has more than eighty working groups, looking at everything from community banking to town planning. It has significant media support. It has ties to trades unions, environmental activists, and the backing of celebrities and public intellectuals, such as Sachs and his colleague Joseph Stiglitz.
What is needed is some way to build upon these successes while maintaining the energy and enthusiasm that O.W.S. has unleashed. The recent history of the “Indignants” in Spain shows that a heterogeneous protest movement can survive the loss of its focal point. In June, after repeated clashes with the police, the Spanish protesters decided to leave their encampment in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol. The movement lives on: last month, hundreds of thousands of people marched in its support through Madrid, Barcelona, and other cities.
Can O.W.S. make a similar transition? I hope so. (from The New Yorker)
Court Restraining Order Against NYC Re: Occupation of Liberty
Reading Over Your Head: Some Strategies
I recently wrote a slideshow about close reading, called "Reading Over Your Head".
As you know, I know almost no Russian - and you might think that I therefore
could not possibly read a “real” document in Russian. But I took on the challenge
of doing just that, and in the slides below I have some strategies for reading
comprehension that may be useful to you. Using the skills for reading that you
already take for granted in your native language, and using some Internet tools
that can help you leverage the English you know already, you can go a long way
toward understanding a text that looks very daunting at first. I’ll walk you through
the process that I used to read an excerpt from a text in Russian, and you’ll see my
strategies for getting to the meaning of the reading.
Please view my slideshow at the following link:
https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=df9rd5g7_182gzstx847
... and try out some of my strategies as you begin reading more.
A New Communicating Abroad Project, Fall 2011
A new Communicating Abroad Project has started!
Please write your reviews of the communication with your American partners.
Unemployment in the US
From Democracy Now:
National Unemployment Falls Slightly as Checks Run Out for Most Out-of-Work
Americans
The nation’s official unemployment rate fell slightly to 9 percent in October, but government
figures show just 80,000 jobs were added in the month. According to economist Dean Baker,
at the current pace it will take more than 33 years to return to the pre-recession rates of
unemployment. Meanwhile, unemployment checks have now run out for the majority of
Americans out of work, a shift that points to a growing crisis of long-term unemployment.
Early last year, 75 percent of unemployed workers received unemployment checks.
Now the figure is just 48 percent.
In last Wednesday's class, we talked about people being out of work - not having jobs. I am
posting this note because I may not have been clear about the number of jobs available.
Many people apply for jobs, without being able to get one. If five (or more) people apply for the
same job, only one person can get the job and the others remain without work. And many
jobs being advertised say that you have to have a job already to apply for their position. A
person who is unemployed has a harder time finding a job.
The Occupy Movement: An Update from Democracy Now
Here's an update from Democracy Now (October 31 headlines):
Dozens Arrested in Occupy Protests Nationwide
The Occupy Wall Street movement continues to face government crackdowns nationwide
with a series of arrests over the weekend. In Denver, riot police fired pepper balls and mace
into a crowd of protesters after they attempted to move onto the State Capitol grounds.
Some 20 people were arrested, including 13 who tried to erect a tent in an adjacent park.
The arrests followed a peaceful march that drew thousands of people into the streets of Denver.
Roughly 30 people were arrested in Portland, Oregon, on charges of criminal trespassing,
interfering with a police officer and disorderly conduct, after they remained in an upscale park
beyond curfew hours. Meanwhile, police in Austin, Texas, arrested 39 demonstrators for
attempting to maintain food tables at their City Hall encampment. In Tennessee, a night court
magistrate has refused to sign off on an arrest warrant targeting demonstrators because, he
argued, state officials have no authority to set the curfew. Among those arrested in Nashville,
Tennessee, over the past week was a reporter for the Nashville Scene who identified himself
to officers as a member of the media. The reporter, Jonathan Meador, caught his arrest on
camera.
Reporters covering stories at events are not supposed to be arrested
(The Constitution's Freedom of the Press).