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

Listening Skills for Engineering and Technical English, Intermediate Level, is the second 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 intermediate 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 DVD.

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 stimulated 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.

• 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 already 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 intermediate

students 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 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 intermediate-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.