Transcripts
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CD1 Track 3 Ex 2.4
Listen to Part 3 of the talk. Complete this excerpt by writing two to six words in each space.
Part 3
So what is the solution to these two problems? Well, firstly, you need to get as much practice listening to natural speech as possible. Listen to extracts from lectures and try to develop your understanding of how words and phrases are really pronounced, not how you expect them to be pronounced. And secondly, you need to accept that when you listen you may misunderstand what is being said. So you need to be ready to change your mind about your understanding of the meaning, if what you hear doesn’t make sense compared to what you understood before. And this means taking a flexible, open-minded approach to listening.
CD1 Track 4 Ex 3.2
Listen to Part 1 of the talk and make notes about points 1–3.
Part 1
Good morning. I’m talking to you this morning because I’m interested in the differences between academic cultures in China and the UK. Now, what I mean by ‘academic cultures’ is simply how students study in the two countries – what are the different components of their courses, what teachers expect from them, and so on. And I’d like to present my ideas to you today and get some feedback from you. The thing I want to focus on particularly is lectures. I’m interested in the difference between lectures, both in terms of how the lectures are organized or presented and also in terms of how the lecture fits into the overall academic programme.
Now, the first question I need to address is, ‘How do I know anything about lectures in China?’ because I haven’t studied there and in fact I haven’t even been there. Well, I found out by interviewing Chinese students. What I did was conduct a so-called ‘tracking study’. That means that you follow students over a period of time. What I did was to follow 12 Chinese students, all doing different courses, different master’s courses at the University of Reading, and over their year of study I interviewed them three times individually. I interviewed them once
in the autumn term, once in the spring term and then again in the summer term. And the interviews lasted for about an hour, an hour and a quarter. I asked them a number of questions about studies in the UK and about their studies in China. So my information comes from them and so I have to say right from the beginning that I am talking here about information I got from 12 students, which is obviously a very small sample, and I don’t know how representative what they said is of the Chinese education system as a whole. So we have to remember that limitation. I did choose different students from different parts of China, and I made sure that there was an equal number of men and women, and they were all studying different courses here at Reading, so there was a range of backgrounds and experience. But there is that limitation. However, I felt that what I was hearing from the students was actually very similar. I mean, what they were saying individually was more or less the same. So I felt that maybe there is some basis for what they said, and maybe what they did say and maybe their experience was not untypical, in general, of students in China.
CD1 Track 5 Ex 3.4
In Part 2 of the talk, the lecturer first talks about some of the characteristics of lectures in China and then compares these with lectures in the UK. Listen and make notes on the main points he makes.
Part 2
OK, so what did I find out? I think the first thing to say is that my impression is that in China the lecture delivers a lot of the content of the course, or the lecturer delivers a lot of the content of the course. And this seems to be especially true at undergraduate level. And just to reinforce this, the students I talked to were postgraduate students. In other words, they’d done undergraduate studies in China. I’m not sure about postgraduate studies in China. But what they said about undergraduate courses was that a lot of the course content came through the lectures. In other words, the students go to the lectures, they make notes in the lectures, and at the end of the term, or at the end of the year, if they have a test or examination, in many cases they simply give back to the lecturer what the lecturer gave to them during the lectures. And that seems to be sufficient to pass the exam and pass the course.
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