"Proper" methods for teaching/studying listening material?

[joshuawbb]

I'd like to ask everyone how they were taught/taught themselves listening skills in Chinese - I'm particularly referring to the ways you were taught or handled listening exercises in a class, and for Tingli HSK prep (for HSKers). What method of teaching listening materials do you consider to be the best, or most proper?

In my listening university lessons, I'm getting more and more disillusioned by the methods used by my teachers to do listening exercises (multi-choice answers, answer-the-question types, etc). With multi-choice questions, my current teacher gives us no time to read the answers and immediately starts the audio for the set of 10 or so questions. She also allows no pause after each question, thus allowing less than 2 seconds of time to read the answers process the meanings, and choose the right one. The dialogue speed itself is fine, just we are given no time to actually fully comprehend the answers. These are usually not easy single-word answers; most are a fairly long sentence, the questions often asking you to select the speaker's correct overall meaning. Once the 10 questions are over, the teacher wonders why so little students can answer the questions after the first few.

This to me feels ridiculous and masochistic, and I think the above is simply poor teaching in the first place. What I'd like to ask is what have your experiences been? Were they similar? What do you think is the proper for a teacher to teach such listening material? I want to measure whether my assumption that this is poor teaching is correct, or if I'm complaining too much about a method which may be alike HSK anyway (I've yet to sit a HSK). My previous semester had a better teacher, but was often fairly similar. Here are some other methods that I have been through in class:

--Allowing a minute or two to read all the multi-choice answers to all the questions, then playing all the questions without a pause, assuming we can retain all the answers. Whilst this gives us time to read the answers, I don't think it's right at all to give time only beforehand to read all of them. Surely you'd only get to question 4 or so before forgetting them anyway, making it no different really from what I wrote above. A variation on this is making the students read out loud all the answers, which doesn't exactly make a difference.

--Playing all the questions continuously, without repeating them. I'm not so sure whether to think of this as wrong or right. My initial thought was that the teacher should play all long questions and dialogues twice (after each other, not at the end) so that a student can at first grasp the meaning, and then on the repeat focus on what the question is looking for. That has always been the method used back in the UK at secondary school and college, though of course, that was for lower-level language. I felt that was correct, but understand that not repeating the dialogue may be standard too. What method does the HSK use? Repeating or once-only? What do you think is right?

--Playing all questions/dialogues together once, then repeating them again together. I think this is far better than the above method of just playing them all straight, since it allows a full repeat and repeating them individually might make it too easy, depending on the type of question. To be honest, I'm personally torn between in my opinion this being the ideal method (along with appropriate short pauses), and repeating the dialogues indivudually (with appropriate short pauses too).

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What are your comments about these methods - do you agree with me? What do you suggest to be the ideal method? I would naturally assume that the standardised method of the HSK is the best, but I've never been to one yet (I'm registered for the Elementary on April 18th). In my own opinion which I don't claim to be right or best, I feel this is a good method for multi-choice:

--Playing all dialogues/questions through twice (playing all straight, then repeating everything once).

--Before each question, allowing about 5 seconds to read through answer choices if short, 10 seconds or so for longer answers.

--After the question, allowing maybe 3 seconds or so to select answers for easy and simple questions, 5-8 or so for harder ones, before going into the time for reading the next question's answers.

In all the language exams I've taken back in the UK, the specific seconds given for question reading and answer selecting were indicated by beeps in the recording. For example, after a question was asked/dialogue read, the recording would later beep once to indicate that the X seconds answering time was up, and the student should now be focusing on the next question's answers. So lastly, with the method I wrote above, is it realistic or am I just dreaming in long-time luxury? Are listening exercises meant to be as brutal as my current teacher's methods?

Many, many thanks for your input!

[taylor04]

Just ask her to pause it after the question is played so you can read the answer. The HSK tingli test is a once through thing with a small pause after the question so you can answer. I never liked my tingli classes; always considered them a waste of time. If you truly want to improve tingli, and going by the fact that you are registered for the elementary HSK test, just go talk to Chinese people. My listening skills have almost always been better than my classmates, and I attribute it to going out and talking to Chinese people, thats why you're studying anyways, right?

Once you understand almost all normal conversations (able to guess what they are saying even if you don't know the word), then I would recommend you to start watching Chinese tv shows. With tv shows, you get to practice listening to conversations at normal speeds, and you not only have subtitles to see the character but also pronunciation making it easy to look a word up.

I'm saying all this assuming you don't want to be a great test taker, but rather really learn Chinese.

[wushijiao]

This may not answer your question directly, but I found the following book to be useful at prepping myself for the HSK listening:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/8525-hsk-%e5%90%ac%e5%8a%9b%e9%a2%98%e5%9e%8b%e5%88%86%e6%9e%90%e4%b8%8e%e8%ae%ad%e7%bb%83-%e5%88%9d%e4%b8%ad%e7%ad%89&highlight=hsk+listening

Also, if I'm not mistaken, you listen to one short clip and then answer the two or three questions related to it. Therefore,I think it's best to practice analyzing question type analysis (so you know what to listen for) and keyword analysis.

[smiss]

I agree that the teaching method for Tingli in China is usually not helping to improve. That's just about learning the skills to choose the correct answer without actually understanding anything (which works). I would go a step further and claim that it is almost impossible to get better in Tingli in class at all, no matter what the method is.

I think the most important aspect about learning Tingli is learning words and expressions in context. That means just watching TV or listening to radio shows might be fun, but that does not help to improve, too. Your short-time memory picks it up and a minute later... it's gone. And that's the same with talking to people, which has only one advantage: You can ask for unknown expressions or talk about them, which might help to retain the expression later on. But you can't always ask for anything...

Instead, the only way is watching Videos and writing down new words. Then repeat the scene and watch it again. It's the same with the tapes and the book that you use in class. I could only improve in the long-run if I prepared everything well at home in advance. That means I listened to the tape and if I did not understand anything, I had a look at the teacher's book that you hopefully got, too. Then I learned what I didn't understand which is usually an unknown or not-so-well-known word.

BTW, back then it helped me a lot, to do what every middle school foreign language teacher disapproves: To try to understand every word in a sentence.

In my opinion that's the best way to learn it. Tingli class is just about verifying and repeating the new skills that you acquired at home.

[imron]

This thread has some good ideas for improving your listening skills outside of a classroom setting. Some of the links are no longer valid (CRI for example), but similar listening materials can be found elsewhere. I found it to be very helpful (in particular, the comments by 赫杰) .

Although the method used in your classes doesn't sound like the most ideal way to learn, it does sound like it mimics what you'll find on the HSK - very little time to answer/prepare and no pausing/repeating the audio.

From your post however it sounds like your problem is not listening, but rather reading. In this case, you'll probably find that improving your reading speed pays big dividends.

[joshuawbb]

Awfully sorry for being away so long, studying keeps me away from the internet for long periods of time.

She's been getting the message lately and has allowed better pauses between the questions - I guess as training for the HSK I should get used to it. But, honestly speaking I've not been attending many of those Tingli classes lately, partly because the Hanyu Jiaocheng book we use is from 1999 and probably hasn't changed an awful lot over the years. Instead of the tingli classes I am focusing on the HSK 8 Essentials of HSK books, which were recommended in different threads. I also found 听力题型分析与训练 in the local bookstore and will get it soon. That being said, I really don't know whether I'm taking the old or new HSK, but I'm sure the study material should be relevant enough either way

I enjoy listening through Chinese reader book audio, though the Hanyu Breeze 1 and 2 series are getting too basic for me vocabulary-wise - I'm not at all knocking them at all though since I still find them fantastic for grammar, general listening and speed reading. I'm enjoying Graded Chinese Reader 3 quite a lot, since it contains a card to hide the pinyin.

Wushijiao, thank you for the recommendation; before exploring people's recommendations here I just had no idea what sort of HSK textbook to go for. Just like general textbooks, there are loads of them out there, I guess not all good. I'm going for 听力题型分析与训练 tomorrow. Have you tried the HSK 8 series? I'm getting used to them so far, they've certainly made me realise that despite knowing a lot of characters now, I really need to increase the amount of general words I know. My ratio of unique characters to words learned is about 1100 characters to 1800 words so far, just taken from Hanzi statistics in Anki (with a bit shaved off).

I agree with you very much; indeed, it often seems the key to succeeding in exams is to know the exam techniques, instead of just knowing all the knowledge. My previous language exams back home were done very well in my opinion, testing your overall understanding, etc, instead of the method of picking correct answers after listening to an audio you may or may not have been intended to fully understand. The exams for others subjects back home though, particularly Psychlogy A-Levels, required a trained understanding of how to write the exams, from paragraphing to exactly the type of points to mention in each paragraph - e.g. 5 distinct "point, evidence, explain" paragraphs.

Taking advice from your replies, I've been putting more emphasis on conversing with others and listening to natural, authentic materials for tingli. Naturally, I can't avoid the HSK book practice though to know the exam technique. In particular from imron's advice, I've been training my speed-reading comprehension a lot, something I didn't take into consideration before. Thanks for that

Thanks again for all your advice. I guess when the HSK exam comes I'll find out just how good (or not) I am at exam tingli.

[Guest realmayo]

I also find 听力 classes in Chinese university boring. I'm trying to work out if there are any benefits in going to class, rather than using the mp3s and the book on my own. The only advantage of going to class so far is that there there is someone to tell me if the answer is right or wrong.

[imron]

partly because the Hanyu Jiaocheng book we use is from 1999 and probably hasn't changed an awful lot over the years.

That's ok, the Chinese language hasn't changed that much in the last ten years either, so the book is probably still mostly valid

[smiss]

But in that case the content seems boring. It doesn't concern any currently relevant problems in China, but this would be motivating.