Tεχνικές ακουστικής κατανόησης ξένου εξειδικευμένου λόγου και κράτησης σημειώσεων

Abstract

Postgraduate studies in a foreign country have always been one of the most popular options for students. In our days, the financial crisis has intensified the need for improvement, not only of the students’ scientific qualification, but also of their working prospects and conditions. As a result, there is a great exodus of young Greek university graduates who pursue postgraduate studies and work abroad. Language becomes the most decisive factor in this mobility. Many Greeks, especially turn to learning the German language, because the German market is one of the most attractive target work markets in Europe. This paper is aimed at students who study “German for Academic Purposes” and who are interested in continuing their studies or in working in a German speaking country. Because this university course takes place in the form of co-teaching and involves students of different specializations, it is possible to serve only general academic purposes.

Only those techniques are presented, that will enable students to become gradually competent at listening to scientific lectures of their specialty and keep comprehensive, useful notes, which will eventually summarize the lectures’ contents. The teaching method promoted is a variant of the CLIL1 method, which combines both electronic (recorded lectures by specialists are posted online) as well as live teaching (the language teacher makes a linguistic analysis of the recorded text and proposes techniques for listening comprehension and production in writing). It is interesting to highlight the difficulties that students face in listening to the recorded lectures (fast pace and speaker-specific pronunciation, low level semantic comprehension of the whole message in case of unknown words, misinterpretation of the text due to pseudophilic words, phonology-articulation issues, a different way of perceiving the cultural references and the structure of speech, and the inability of restraining the information they have heard and to directly reproduce it in written form).

Below, are various theoretical approaches to listening and keeping notes by Stangl, Kruse, Jakobs, Ruhmann and Esselborn-Krumbiegel. Finally, based on the study of the above theoretical approaches and on the lecturer’s experience in the educational process, techniques are proposed that concern not only the transmission of language but also the cultivation of methodological skills in order for students to progressively develop the necessary skills for:

A) Understanding the terms or, more generally, the unknown vocabulary 1) Components analysis of the term or of the unknown word in order to achieve their interpretation, especially if one knows the ancient Greek or Latin language. 2) Interpretation of unknown words and terms through the use of contextual or paralinguistic elements. 3) Search by whom and to what extent the terms have been used so far. 4) Marking of the rapporteur's phrases. 5) Search for unknown terms in dictionaries.

B) Understanding the overall lecture content 1) Activation of pre-existing knowledge with relevant questions from the language teacher on the lecture topic and the reasons for this. 2) Enable the vocabulary of the subject through brainstorming. 3) Predicting the content of the topic. 4) Recognizing the speech structure by pointing out words (nouns and verbs) and grammatical elements (links, adverbs and pronouns). 5) Recognition of quotations in the oral speech. 6) Orientation of the attention depending on the kind of information the student needs (general, detailed or selective understanding). 7) Cultivation of cultural perception, i.e. knowledge of the culture of the country where the students’ target language is spoken. 8) Check the students' ability to understand by grouping them. One group writes questions about the content of the input, while the other groups are asked to answer these questions.

C) Understanding the characteristics of the specialized speech and the lecturer’s arguments 1) Exploiting knowledge about speech models: explicit models that can provide important information to students about the communicative circumstance they need to understand are often repeated in the specialized speech and argumentation. 2) Marking examples, conclusions, tones and vocabulary of the lecturer, in addition to the terms, questions he/she asks, in order to enable the student to predict something important.

D) Good keeping of notes 1) Appropriate structuring of the lecture content by prioritizing events. 2) Identify and record key information and conclusions. 3) Record only new information. 3) Use abbreviations or symbols for terms but also for words. 3) Recording unfamiliar words. 4) Record numbers and link them to the information. 5) Record different arguments to a column label. 6) Classify information according to their topic or based on questions such as where, who, when, how, why, what. 7) Using charts, diagrams. 8) Record on the far right end of the page with an asterisk the student's personal views on the subject and quote examples.9) Summary of notes in completed sentences at the end of each page.

E) The effective use of notes 1) Review the notes in as short a time as possible. 2) Organize the structure of the notes if they are raw. 3) When editing notes, analyze abbreviations and compile keyword-based complete sentences. 4) Exchange of notes between students to find out the missing points.