Tips on my dictation exercises
Dear forum friends,
In the past two months, I focused my mind on dictation exercises in order to improve my listening comprehension ability and to sharpen my hearings. At least three hours a day I have to spend on listening materials download from VOA Special English programs. And my favorite programs are American Stories, Words and Their Stories, Reports and 1530 News.
Frankly speaking, VOA Special English is not difficult to understand. All narrators speak in a calm moderate speed, and most of all, their intonations and pronunciations are so clear and beautiful that you would never feel doing dictation exercises is a torment or harass, instead it is rather an enjoyment.
However, sometimes your comprehension ability would cheat you when listening to daily international news. It gives you a false impression as if you can fully understand what are being reported. That is because sometimes we have already known what have happened in the world from other media sources, say, from TV, newspapers etc. Whereas by doing dictation exercises, your deficiencies on English knowledge, including spelling mistakes, will be defiantly nowhere to hide.
The exercise forces you to pay more attention on spelling, punctuation, capital letters where necessary etc. and it helpsyou to choose a correct word according to the meaning of a word from its context. For example, we sometimes would mix up two homophony words, like “of” and “off”; “too” and “two”; "series" and "serious" etc. It also happens in two similar-pronounced words. Once we dictated an American story, almost everyone misprinted “oak tree” to “old tree”; “grindstone” to “ground stone”, or “grant stone”, or “grand stone” etc. You see?
The four skills, or rather, five skills – listening, speaking, reading, writing, speaking and translating must complement one another. However, during a certain period, we can also concentrate our minds on one particular skill as I did in the past two months. At very beginning when I started to listen to the international news, I was almost desperate for those elusive names and geographic names in Middle East area. However, this area is the hot spot in everyday top news, and if I could not overcome this obstacle, I would never feel free when listening to the news. So after one or two weeks, after I have memorized the words like “Bekaa Valley, Gaza Strip, Hezbollah, Shiite / Sunni Muslim, Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Tamil Tiger, East Timor …”and those important nations' leaders names,like Israeli PM Ehud Olmert; Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas; US Secretary Condoleezza Rice; Japanese PM Junichiro Koizumi..., I feel listening and dictating to the news is not that horrible!
Wide knowledge is also required when listening to reports. The VOA programs provide Development, Agriculture, Health, Education, and Economics Reports in turn during weekdays. Professional medical terms are extremely difficult for a beginner, and also a headache even for those middle-leveled listeners.
Now I have tasted the joys of two months’hard work and I can feel my listening comprehension has improved a bit and my hearing sharpened. In the long term, basic knowledge of reading, listening comprehension, writing, speaking and translation ability must go hand in hand for one ability will surely help the other.
That is what I have learned from dictation exercises and I’d like to share it with my forum friends. I am cheerful to see my making progress everyday though mine does not deserve mentioning compared with those of true English masters around.
In short, to learn a foreign language is completely different from to learn a mother tongue. At this point of view, any extra efforts are a worthwhile job for any foreign language learners.
[ 本帖最后由 jeannie 于 2006-8-4 04:34 PM 编辑 ]
