Listening Skills for Engineering and Technical English, Elementary Level, First Edition

Listening Skills for Engineering and Technical English, Elementary Level, is the first in a series of English language texts designed for use in engineering and technology colleges, institutes, and adult English-language training programmes. This volume consists of eight units, and each unit is divided into two main parts. The units are organized around selected rhetorical functions: general ideas, specific information, classification, defining, chronological order, cause and effect, comparison and contrast, and processes and procedures. The book is aimed at Arab students who are at an elementary level of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Each unit proceeds from listening at sentence level to listening to a short passage, and aims at developing students’ skills in listening in engineering and technical English. Prelistening and postlistening activities are included in each unit. The book is accompanied 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 subject

matter and prepare them for listening. This is also developed by pictures relevant

to the topic of the unit.

• Vocabulary Preview

A list of key vocabulary items that are undefined in the listening. They are briefly

defined in the preview and are accompanied by sentences with missing words to

be filled in.

• Listening

The listening passages are read by a variety of native speakers of English. The

vocabulary, structure, content variation, redundancy, and rhetorical style of each

passage have been carefully chosen and designed.

iv

Preface

• Listening Exercises

A variety of listening exercises that focus on listening skills as related to the

rhetorical function being focused on. These include, among other skills and

strategies, making an outline, which is partially completed in order to lay out the

rhetorical structure of the talk.

• After Listening

Written exercises focusing on the specific rhetorical function being examined in

order to help the listener reconstruct important information from the talk.

Rationale for the Course Design

Listening to sentence-level material and short passages trains elementary

students in listening skills relevant to the rhetorical functions.

Materials are controlled for concept-recycling. Each passage contains a

limited number of ideas that the listener hopefully 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

the ability to process spoken language for increasingly longer spans of time – a

highly desirable target.

In order to ensure a high degree of comprehension of the passage, a

large percentage of content words need to be readily understood. The topics

chosen for the talks have, therefore, been made as tangible as possible, with the

vocabulary kept within an elementary-level word-frequency range.

Finally, an important skill for students is note-taking, by which they

spot the main points of a talk and write them down in note form. These notes

help the listener to remember the main points of the talk. Note-taking is an individual

activity, so one person may have difficulty understanding another person’s notes.

The activities in this book should help a student learn to take down clearer, more

concise notes. In further activities, the learner is often asked to complete the

partial notes given.