Listening Comprehension: Study vocab out of context then listen?

[shibole]

In the Integrated Chinese workbook it says that for the listening comprehension exercises, you should study the vocabulary then listen to the dialog recordings before reading through the "text" (I assume they mean dialog text).

I tried this and I was not very happy with the approach, but maybe I'm doing something wrong.

I found that it was much harder to study the vocabulary without having any context. Then when I did listen to the dialog I found that my comprehension was pretty poor. Maybe that's pretty normal, I'm not sure.

My main problem is that I feel like trying to study the vocabulary in isolation like this is inefficient. Perhaps my problem is that I didn't proceed with the dialog until I was able to not only say the words but also read and write them.

Anyway, I'm curious as to what opinions people have on this and, if they are in a classs (I am not) how their teacher handles introducing vocabulary and new dialogs.

[roddy]

I think waiting till you can read and write the vocab is probably a bit excessive and likely to slow down your progress. As for studying the new vocab before or after listening - I would go for after, assuming that you can still make some sense of the piece. You won't (shouldn't, otherwise it's too easy) be able to understand it all but if you can get into the habit of thinking 'ok, that's new, from context sounds like it means . . .' rather than expecting to know everything before you listen you'll cope better with real-life situations in the future - when, tragically, you will not have a handy list of new vocab.

One exercise I used to do when I was teaching English was to write up new vocab on the board, drill the pronunciation, but not teach anything about meaning. Then play the listening and try and get the students to figure out what the words actually meant. Can be quite a confidence boost (if you get it right . . .)

[Luobot]

As a general approach, I go both ways on this. When the material is not that hard and I’m able to understand a fair amount of it, then I prefer to listen to the dialogue first to see how much of it I can get, as Roddy suggested. Also, if it's a short dialogue, then there's not much time wasted in listening to it, even if you don't understand it all.

On the other hand, if the dialogue is long and very challenging (e.g., too many new words, too fast paced, sentences too long and complex), then I prefer to not memorize, but familiarize myself with the new vocabulary beforehand. This allows me to concentrate on understanding the sentences as a whole, rather than stumbling on the new words as the sentences whiz by. It also cuts down on the frustration that I feel from not understanding what I hearing. And it seems more efficient to me because I’m not wasting time listening to something that’s going in one ear and out the other.

If you have a decent shot at figuring out a significant portion of the dialogue from context, then you’re better off taking a stab at that first. On the other hand, if you’re getting frustrated from listening to the dialogue and not really understanding much of it, then familiarize yourself with the vocabulary beforehand, and then listen to the dialogue before resorting to the explanations in the text.

I'm probably giving you a minority report. Everyone is different, and I think you should simply try it both ways to see what works best for you. Also be willing to adjust your strategy whenever you feel that you're hitting a wall.

[shibole]

Thanks guys. I can see that there's no simple answer to these things. It sounds like I just need to get used to the idea that different methods are going to work better in different cases.