Academic listening

One of my overseas students recently told me that he understood only about half of what he heard in his lectures! I think it is probably unusual to understand only half but I think it does show many of the difficulties that overseas students face. The important thing that overseas students need to realise is that whatever course you are doing at university, you are still English language learners, and you still need to do extra work on your English. But do remember that your lecturers and university staff want to help you! If you are finding it difficult to follow lectures there are a few things you can do to help yourself:

1. Form a study group. This means finding other students like yourself who want to go over what the lecturer said. After the lecture arrange to sit down somewhere (like the Students Union, or a cafe) and tell each other what you understood in the lecture. Swap your ideas on the content of the lecture. Ask the other group members about things you didn’t understand.

2. Ask university staff for help. In my experience good students do this all the time, and the students who are less confident and with weaker English skills are worried about doing this, and don’t do it! So the good students get the help and get better, whilst the weaker students fall further behind. You can make an appointment with your tutor who will probably be happy to spend 15 minutes explaining some things. If you cannot do this with your content tutor then you may be able to do this in the English Language Centre – most universities offer a language support service where you can sign up for a tutorial. Ask your lecturer if he or she can supply powerpoint slides so that you can go over the slides afterwards, or even before the lecture. Your lecturers may be very busy but they will not mind you e mailing them with this request – they will be impressed with your motivation.

3. You should do some extra listening practice! What you need is some long stretches of speech to listen to, with a tapescript that you can look at when you don’t understand the speaker. So I’m going to give you a link to a BBC site which has lots of lectures with the tapescripts too. This link is to a list of lectures called The Reith Lectures. Every year the BBC gets a well-known person to give a series of lectures. At this site you can listen to and read lectures going back several years. In the lastest series of lectures the speaker talks about globalisation, and the need for the world to pull together to face the challenges of population growth and environmental difficulties. This link I’m giving you is to lecture 1 in this series of lectures. You will see the transcript right in front of you and you just need to simply hit the audio button to listen to the lecture. The lecture is LONG. That’s OK. You don’t need to listen to it all. Listen for a couple of minutes without looking at the transcript, and then look at the transcript. Play those parts you found difficult again, whilst looking at the transcript. Then listen again without the transcript. You should find your ability to distinguish individual words increasing. When you’ve had enough, stop. Come back for a few minutes another day. If you find the lecture content so interesting that you just carry on listening, then that is excellent language practice. Here’s the link.

Some students will find this ‘heavy going’. That’s OK too and I’ll be presenting some lighter listening in future posts.

Improving your academic vocabulary

Today I am going to show you a link to an impressive site created by Sandra Haywood at the University of Nottingham where you can really improve your understanding and use of academic vocabulary. The exciting thing about this site is that you make the exercises, using your texts. The problem with many exercises you find is that the exercise does not seem to be relevant to you because it is not your subject, or the topic does not interest you. With this website you can do two things: firstly you can paste your own text into it and it will automatically highlight all the academic vocabulary in your text. This means it draws your attention to these important words. Secondly, it will automatically remove these words from the text and show them below the text – and yes, you’ve guessed it – you put them back in. How does it know which words to select? Well, (if you didn’t know) there is a big list of academic words in English. You can see what these words are at this site. This list is called the Academic Word List. The list has 570 words in it – and you should know them well and be able to use them! The list is divided into 10 sublists. Sublist 1 has the most common words, sublist 2 the next most common ones and so on down to sublist 10. Take a look at these sublists at the site and choose which word lists you want to work with. Look here. OK, so now you are going to make your own exercise. You need a text to work with. You can use an article from a journal, or a newspaper article. Why not try something from The Economist? Copy your text, and paste it into the AWL Highlighter here. Choose which word lists you want to study ( if you are not sure choose 5 and see how you get on) and hit ’submit’. Wow! The words from the academic word list are highlighted! Look at these words carefully – are you familiar with them? Do you know what they mean and how they are used? Use a dictionary and a concordancer to find out more about them if you need to. Now follow the link in the site for AWL Gapmaker, or click here to get there. Paste in your text, choose the sublist you want to work with and hit ’submit’. You will see your text there with the academic words removed, and placed down below the text. You have created your own gap fill activity using your own text in your own subject. What a resource! Get going guys!

Dictionaries

A few words today about dictionaries – get a good one! Teachers are constantly surprised that students do not make this small investment in their learning. Students (or more accurately their parents) pay thousands of pounds for a course at an overseas university but then are not prepared to pay £18 (about $30) more to improve their chances in doing well on that course! Imagine that you spend thousands of pounds on a lovely new car. Would you spend another £18 on it for insurance? Or to make sure it had the best service? Or to install a high security system so that no one could steal it? Or would you think ‘Well, I’ve spent enough so I’m not going to spend anymore’? I think you would probably spend the extra money to protect your investment and that’s why you should buy a good dictionary.

You probably have a bilingual dictionary already. You also need a good monolingual Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. These dictionaries are big and heavy but you don’t need to carry it around with you all the time, you can leave it on your desk where you study. These dictionaries explain words in English and give example sentences using these words. Very often when I correct an essay I see words that are used wrongly. If I point this out to a student and show them the word in an Advanced Learner’s Dictionary they can see immediately that it was the wrong word to use. Sometimes I even come across words in essays that I have never even seen before because students have used a bilingual dictionary which suggests inappropriate words. Before you use a new word for this first time you should refer to an Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, check the meaning, and look at the example sentence which is given for it. If you can’t find the word at all then this is a warning!

There are lots of good dictionaries out there. Some of them are:

Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s Dictionary
Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary
Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary
Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English

Remember – you will have your dictionary for the rest of your life so it’s money well spent. Take a look at this nice little article on dictionaries from antimoon.com for more tips regarding dictionaries.

(Is that a fire engine I can hear? Have my children managed to burn the house down?!)

Quality Research with Google Scholar

I had a student in my office the other day and I was surprised to find out that they had never used Google Scholar for their research. Google Scholar will show you results of your search in journals. If you want quality articles on your subject you will find them in journals. If you are not familiar with journals then you should be, they are where academics publish their work. You can compare a usual Google search with a Google Scholar search. With the usual Google search you will find all sorts of webpages coming up. These pages are often not reliable and often change and disappear. Your bibliography for your essay will not be a good one with a lot of random websites in it. Remember – anyone can publish anything on the Internet (yes, including me!!). But journals have academic reliability. If you put a search term into Google Scholar (address: http://scholar.google.co.uk/) you will find lots of articles in journals coming up. If you are doing your search on a university computer you should be able to access these articles – although it may take several clicks to reach the text itself. First you will be taken to the journal page and you will see the abstract. Read the abstract because this will tell you whether or not the article is really what you want. You will have to look around the page to find the link which says DOWNLOAD THE FULL TEXT, usually it is a PDF file. Your university has paid for access to these journals so you should use them! (Some of the journals may not be accessible through your university.)If you have a laptop and you want to use it from home to access journals then you should go along to the university library and ask the staff about accessing e-journals from home. They may be able to give you a password so you can do this. However, I would recommend that you try it on a university computer first so you know what is available. If your university has not subscribed to the journals you will not be able to access them and you will be asked to pay. When you see the cost of getting the article you will be horrified! The cost could be $30! For one article! And you might not even think it’s that good after you’ve read it! I wouldn’t recommend buying an article if you haven’t seen it.

When you have found your good quality material just make sure you use it properly for your work and that means proper referencing and paraphrasing. Your lecturer or tutor will know immediately if the work you give in is not yours and they are constantly watching out for this. Copying work and giving it in pretending it is your work is called plagiarism – more on that later!