Reflection 4 by Changchang Yao

  For the fourth reflection, I would like to talk about some L2 listening learning experience for myself, which could be useful for ESL teachers in our class.
  In China, we learn English from kindergarden to college level, but there is no authentic resource used in classes. The listening material are mostly tape recorded, and it is all the same one around China. One thing confused me is that some are British accent, some tapes are American accent, so Chinese students usually do not have a specific main stream accent, and very limited source of recognizing various sentences. All of my teachers spoke very "fancy" English, so I hardly get anything form them. For example, the greeting would be only like, "hi, how are you? I am fine. Thank you, and you?" there is even a joke about this greeting.
  And then, I took a class for preparing IELTS. IELTS is a examination designed for test ESL students English ability, functioning the same way as TOFEL. Listening is one of the four parts in IELTS, it is basically listen several dialogs and answer 20 to 30 multiple questions. Since the listening materials are all spoke by native English speakers, it helped me improved a lot through practice listening.
  After I came to East Lansing, it is the most efficient improving period of my English listening. I have the environment  of authentic English, and the environment forced me to use language skills.
  It is the normal Chinese ESL students English education background, I hope it could be useful for future ESL teachers.