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Listening to another person is really hard. We are going to practice being better listeners.
We will listen to our stories. Write down exactly what we hear. Revise the stories and listen to them again.
This excerise is to help us be sure we are really listening to what a person is saying. There is no right and wrong, only better and better.
You will hear Huy talk about his cat. I will play what he said two times.
He said "cat eat fish and uh beef and uh fish".
It is easier to say he said his cat eats fish and beef, but that is not what he said.
Even if you don't understand what he is saying, he used some Vietnamese, you can record the sounds you heard "toi nghi no rat de thoung". It doesn't mean you understood him, it means you were listening to Huy, and that is what he said.
He did have extra words and sounds: ah, uh, and saying fish two extra times.
We will help him stop saying the ah's and uh's and only say 'fish' one time at the right time.
He also spoke Vietnamese. Those words are not extra sounds though. They are important ideas which we need to help him express in English.
We do need to help Huy say the Vietnamese part in English. With our help Huy can do the translating, you don't need to speak Vietnamese. You do need to let him know you can't understand what he said and that you do want to understand. Together we will figure out the English.
The English words he did use were good words. We will help him use them more effectively in the next step.
If we look just at the English we can see his idea is pretty clear:
I think cat eat fish and beef.
CAT does need EATS and should have something, probably MY, in front of it.
Huy is studying now. We are studying- and teaching and learning together. We should try our best now. And we will try our better next time. ;-)
Thank you for helping Huy!
When we listen very carefully we don't have to understand everything. The important point is that the person speaking knows that we are listening to them and that what they have to say is important. This will help them want to learn and improve. We can help them by listening and making corrections if we can. It is not a test, we do not have to get everything right. We do have to treat each other right.
We will get better. Listen to Huy's story before and after. Amazing. It took us about 30 minutes to do the whole thing in class, and Huy got to hear the change in his English right away. When he hears it all in his own voice he knows 'That's me!' I did that. I can speak English better right now.