Academic Listening for Health Professions, Intermeiate level, Second Edition

Welcome to the second edition of Academic Listening For Health Professions, Intermediate Level. This new edition is the product of constantrevision and evaluation, not by me, but by the many instructors who, along with theirstudents, have used the previous edition and have sent in valuable suggestions andcomments. The success of the previous edition has been due, in large measure, to thehonest and careful appraisal given by instructors and their students.

Academic Listening For Health Professions, Intermediate Level is thesecond in a series of English language texts designed for use in health colleges,institutes and adult English-language training programmes. This volume consists of eightunits organized around selected rhetorical functions: general ideas, specificinformation, classification, defining, chronological order, cause and effect,comparing and contrasting, and processes and procedures. The book isaimed at Arab students who are at an intermediate level of English as a ForeignLanguage (EFL). Each unit is graded from listening at sentence level to listening to ashort passage, and aims at developing students’ skills in listening in medical English.Prelistening and postlistening activities are included in each unit. The book isaccompanied by one audio CD.

Organization of Units

Each of the eight units consists of the following sections:

• Before Listening

Some questions to discuss orally in order to give learners an idea of the subjectmatter and prepare them for listening.

• Vocabulary Preview

A list of five to eight vocabulary items that appear undefined in the listening. They arebriefly defined in the preview and are accompanied by sentences with missing words tobe filled in. Brief definitions are sometimes given on the tape, in which case thestudent listens to the talk and then writes a short definition for each item.

• Listening

The listening passages are read by a variety of native speakers of English. Thevocabulary, structure, content variation, redundancy, and rhetorical style of eachpassage have been carefully chosen and designed.

• Listening Exercises

A variety of listening exercises that focus on listening skills is related to the rhetorical function being focused on. These include making an outline which is partiallycompleted in order to lay out the rhetorical structure of the talk.

• After Listening

Written-exercise types on the specific rhetorical function to help the listener reconstruct important information from the talk.

Rationale for the Course Design

Listening to sentence-level material and short passages trains intermediatestudents in listening skills relevant to the rhetorical function under consideration.

Materials are controlled for concept-recycling. Each passage contains a limited number of ideas that the listener retains. Support for these key ideas (that is,recycling) comes in the form of rewordings, examples, clear transition markers,and summarizing.

Because of the graded use of language within the talks, learners acquire theability to process spoken language for increasingly longer spans of time – a highlydesirable target.

In order to ensure a high degree of comprehension and monitoring of passage, a large percentage of content words need to be readily understood. Thetopics chosen for the talks have, therefore, been made as tangible as possible, with thevocabulary kept within an intermediate-level word-frequency range.

Finally, an important skill for students is note-taking, by which they spotthe main points of a talk and write them down in note form. These notes help thelistener to remember the main points of the talk.

Note-taking is an individual activity, so one person may have difficultyunderstanding another person’s notes. The activities in this book should help thestudent take down clearer, more concise notes. In further activities, the learner is

often asked to complete the notes.