英语单词大师：Learning English

 AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble. This week on Wordmaster: English teacher Lida Baker¹ joins us from Los Angeles to talk about authentic² listening materials.

RS: It's the subject of her latest textbook, called "Real Talk 1."LIDA BAKER: "One of the trends in the field in the last few years has been to try to expose students to authentic language, which is language -- English the way people really talk."AA: "So you got your tape recorder out and you walked around and eavesdropped³ or what did you do?"LIDA BAKER: "That's one of the ways that we collected the authentic language samples. So, yeah, we would put a microphone on a table and we would ask people to talk about a certain topic. In-person recordings⁵ were one kind of authentic speech samples that we collected.

"The second kind was phone interviews and phone conversations. And we tried to make these as relevant to real life as we could. So we had, for example, we asked somebody to call up two different car rental⁶ agencies and find out about the price of renting a car. Now the student's task in that case is to listen to both phone recordings and decide if they were going to rent a car, which company would they go to.

"So that's an example of where not only the input⁷, the recording⁴ itself, is authentic, but the task is also authentic, which is another aspect in this movement in our profession towards authentic language teaching. It's not only authentic language teaching, but it's authentic language use."AA: "Let me ask you, obviously when people talk we don't always follow the rules of grammar and syntax and all that.

So how does it benefit students to learn from authentic materials rather than maybe a more traditional approach?"LIDA BAKER: "By listening to the way people really talk, what students have to do is learn how to filter out the parts of the language that are not part of the message they are supposed to get, and tune⁸ in to the parts of the utterance⁹ that are part of the message. Does that make sense? So if I say 'ummm .... ummm ... well, let's see ...'"AA: "I filter that out."LIDA BAKER: "Yeah, as a native speaker you know that that's not part of the message that I'm trying to convey. We actively¹⁰ teach students how to filter that stuff out, because natural language has all kinds of junk in it, if you want to call it that -- we make grammatical errors when we talk, we hesitate, we repeat ourselves, we use fillers which are things like 'uh,' 'um,' 'you know,' 'kind of' and, of course, the famous 'like.' And like is a really interesting example of something that students have to learn how to either tune out or attend to depending on the meaning."AA: "Let me ask you, at what level would you start using authentic materials -- beginner, intermediate, where would you start?"LIDA BAKER: "Believe it or not, you can do it at any level -- you can do it with absolute beginners. But you have to take care to present the language in very small segments with beginners and you also have to create tasks that are at the student's level of ability. Now let me give you a really simple example of what I mean. Very low level students, you might ask them to listen for instance to ... let's say to a weather report.

"And things like weather reports are good because they're short. Now you can give them a list of words related to the weather: it's windy, it's raining, it's cloudy and so on. And you can have students listen to the weather report, which could be as short as ten or fifteen seconds and they have to put a check mark next to the adjectives that they hear. Now that's a really simple task that you can do with beginning students using an authentic recording."AA: Lida Baker, co-author with Judy Tanka of "Real Talk 1: Authentic English in Context."RS: There are even some Wordmaster scripts in their textbook, so you know we're authentic!

AA: And that's Wordmaster for this week. Our e-mail address is [email protected].

RS: And you can find other segments with Lida Baker at voanews.com/wordmaster. I'm Avi Arditti

1 baker   

n.面包师

参考例句：

• The baker bakes his bread in the bakery.面包师在面包房内烤面包。
• The baker frosted the cake with a mixture of sugar and whites of eggs.面包师在蛋糕上撒了一层白糖和蛋清的混合料。

2 authentic   

a.真的，真正的；可靠的，可信的，有根据的

参考例句：

• This is an authentic news report. We can depend on it. 这是篇可靠的新闻报道, 我们相信它。
• Autumn is also the authentic season of renewal. 秋天才是真正的除旧布新的季节。

3 eavesdropped   

偷听（别人的谈话）( eavesdrop的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• He eavesdropped on our conversation. 他偷听了我们的谈话。
• He has just eavesdropped two sweethearts. 他刚刚偷听了两个情人的谈话。

4 recording   

n.录音，记录

参考例句：

• How long will the recording of the song take?录下这首歌得花多少时间？
• I want to play you a recording of the rehearsal.我想给你放一下彩排的录像。

5 recordings   

n.记录( recording的名词复数 )；录音；录像；唱片

参考例句：

• a boxed set of original recordings 一套盒装原声录音带
• old jazz recordings reissued on CD 以激光唱片重新发行的老爵士乐

6 rental   

n.租赁，出租，出租业

参考例句：

• The yearly rental of her house is 2400 yuan.她这房子年租金是2400元。
• We can organise car rental from Chicago O'Hare Airport.我们可以安排提供从芝加哥奥黑尔机场出发的租车服务。

7 input   

n.输入(物)；投入；vt.把(数据等)输入计算机

参考例句：

• I will forever be grateful for his considerable input.我将永远感激他的大量投入。
• All this information had to be input onto the computer.所有这些信息都必须输入计算机。

8 tune   

n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整

参考例句：

• He'd written a tune,and played it to us on the piano.他写了一段曲子，并在钢琴上弹给我们听。
• The boy beat out a tune on a tin can.那男孩在易拉罐上敲出一首曲子。

9 utterance   

n.用言语表达，话语，言语

参考例句：

• This utterance of his was greeted with bursts of uproarious laughter.他的讲话引起阵阵哄然大笑。
• My voice cleaves to my throat,and sob chokes my utterance.我的噪子哽咽，泣不成声。

10 actively   

adv.积极地，勤奋地

参考例句：

• During this period all the students were actively participating.在这节课中所有的学生都积极参加。
• We are actively intervening to settle a quarrel.我们正在积极调解争执。