Basic Listening Course

Author: Qi Weijun / Sun Wanbiao (editors)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-12-01
Features: This book is one of the designated teaching materials for the "Shanghai Foreign Language Interpretation Certificate Examination (English) Basic Interpretation" program, providing appropriate listening exercises and mock tests for candidates seeking the certificate. By using this textbook, candidates can improve their listening skills significantly within a relatively short period, building on their existing foundation. The book selects up-to-date authentic materials, emphasizing the realism and diversity of the language content. Some materials also cover topics such as international trade, finance, and politics. This textbook can be used by training centers or by English learners with corresponding proficiency who wish to enhance their listening skills. Basic Listening Course is designed according to the requirements of the Shanghai English Interpretation Basic Proficiency Examination Syllabus, aiming to enable students to reach the listening level required for the examination through training. The textbook consists of 15 units, which can be used over 15-16 weeks when studied once a week. Each unit is divided into four parts: the first part lists the listening training focus and the listening skills to be mastered for the unit; the next two parts are SECTION ONE and SECTION TWO; the last part is the Interpretation Series Lectures.
SECTION ONE is a comprehensive listening practice with diverse and lively exercise formats, including fill-in-the-blanks (tables), answering questions, and listening and translating sentences. For the vocabulary listed before the exercises, students can preview them before listening to the recording or the teacher can briefly explain them.
SECTION TWO is a mock test for the Basic Interpretation Examination, with question types and requirements that fully align with the Syllabus and a difficulty level roughly equivalent to the actual exam. It is divided into Part A, Part B, and Part C. For all the above exercises, teachers generally should not encourage previewing. After playing the recording once in class, students can be asked to complete the exercises. Of course, teachers must "teach according to aptitude," adjusting the teaching pace based on students' actual proficiency and the difficulty of the recording materials, and may replay the recording as needed. It must be emphasized that the "listening and translating" section in the exercises includes both sentence translation and passage translation. Compared to other English listening tests in China, listening and translating is a new question type, designed to test students' listening comprehension, short-term memory, and translation abilities. Most candidates find this section challenging, so teachers can appropriately slow down the teaching pace in this part, combine it with translation techniques, help students familiarize themselves with it, and gradually improve their listening and translation skills.