me and the students of class 2006

One thing that supports my research proposal for PhD application is that it is extremely difficult to teach English when the students do not have enough exposure to the culture of English speaking country.

I was using Cambridge materials for Listening which is highly British. Once, the students were required to listen to a guy leaving a phone message for a girl. He was in a call box and he said he would call again. The comprehension question was “why can’t the girl phone him back?”. If the students could infer what a call box was, it would be no problem at all for them to answer the comprehension question. By the way, a call box is a public telephone booth according to Merriam-Webster dictionary, and one who has seen or read about a call box (either in person, in movies, in novels) knows that a call box usually can’t be called back.

Got it? Well, it’s easy if you have seen or read about it. Even if you don’t know the words, you usually can infer what is a call box from the words call and box: it’s a box to call!

Another aspect of listening skills that I notice is that in order to successfully comprehend what s/he listens, s/he has to have the ability to adjust his/her ‘ears’ to accommodate different accents, dialects and styles. I personally believe that exposure to different accents, dialects, and styles will be beneficial to train one’s ears to adjust his/her hearing. Again, in SoE, where the environment tends to be homogeneous in terms of ethnic groups, media, references, etc., my students struggled to listen to even a sentence because I think they didn’t get used to listening and adjusting to different styles of speech.

So, the keyword is exposure to the culture. The more varied the exposure is, the better adjustment one makes with one’s hearing. The better the adjustment, the better the listening comprehension. What do you think?