Dear forum friends,
In the past two months, I focused my mind on dictation exercises in order to improve my listening comprehension ability and to sharpen my hearings. At least three hours a day I have to spend on listening materials download from VOA Special
English programs. And my favorite programs are American Stories, Words and Their
Stories, Reports and 1530 News.
Frankly speaking, VOA Special English is not difficult to understand. All narrators speak in a calm moderate speed, and most of all, their intonations and pronunciations are so clear and beautiful that you would never feel doing dictation exercises is a torment or harass, instead it is rather an enjoyment.
However, sometimes your comprehension ability would cheat you when listening to
daily international news. It gives you a false impression as if you can fully understand what are being reported. That is because sometimes we have already known what have happened in the world from other media sources, say, from TV, newspapers etc. Whereas by doing dictation exercises, your deficiencies on English knowledge, including spelling mistakes, will be defiantly nowhere to hide. The exercise forces you to pay more attention on spelling, punctuation, capital letters
where necessary etc. and it helps you to choose a correct word according to the
meaning of a word from its context. For example, we sometimes would mix up two homophony words, like “of” and “off”; “too” and “two”; "series" and "serious" etc. It also happens in two similar-pronounced words. Once we dictated an American story, almost everyone misprinted “oak tree” to “old tree”; “grindstone” to “ground stone”, or “grant stone”, or “grand stone” etc. You see?
Wide knowledge is also required when listening to reports. The VOA programs provide Development, Agriculture, Health, Education, and Economics Reports in turn during weekdays. Professional medical terms are extremely difficult for me. And the people's names, geographic names, organization names in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan etc. also are a headache for most of the listeners.
Now I have tasted the joys of two months’hard work and I can feel my listening
comprehension has improved a bit and my hearing sharpened. In the long term, basic knowledge of reading, listening comprehension, writing, speaking and translation ability must go hand in hand for one ability will surely help the other.
That is what I have learned from dictation exercises and I’d like to share it with my forum friends. I am cheerful to see my making progress everyday though mine does not deserve mentioning compared with those of true English masters around.
