Talk Radio [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIOnTalk Radio is a imilti-skill course for high intermediate to advanced students of English as a second language, which focuses on listening and responding to a series of conversations taped from "Talk Radio" shows on Boston radio station W'RKO. The course is based on the premise that students need to be trained to deal with unscripted conversation, the kind of talk they hear around them in the real world. The textbook and tapes of Talk Radio are designed to provide this kind of training.The main goal of the course is to have students listen to unedited, interesting, and topical conversation, get the gist of it, and learn to be comfortable with a less than perfect grasp of the vocabulary. Students are encouraged to guess at the meanings of words from context and to follow their hunches.The speech on the tapes of Talk Radio is that of natural conversation, complete with repetitions, circumlocutions, doublings back, interjections ("you know," "yeah," etc.), incomplete sentences, interruptions, and fumbling for words. As they listen to the conversations, students are reminded that most people in the United States do not talk like people in the scripted dialogues that they hear and read in their classes, nor like their English teachers, who tend to edit, simphfy, and slow down their speech, and to avoid idiomatic expressions. Just as the speech is natural and uncontrived, so are the issues that are discussed. The callers to WRKO are talking about genuine concerns, not topics created for pedagogical purposes. Thus, students are ex-posed to issues that people are interested in and believe to be important.In addition to the conversations, the course includes guess-from-context exercises based on the vocabulary in the conversations. These exercises help students to increase both their English vocabulary and their listening ability. Exercises at the end of each chapter provide more opportunities for recycling of vocabulary.Each chapter in the text includes one or two readings based on the theme of the chapter. Comprehension exercises focus on discussing the content of the reading and guessing vocabulary from context. Communicative activities in each chapter encourage further conversation about the theme. Writing exercises give students the opportunity to write about what they have been listening to, reading about, and discussing, and provide practice in writing for specific purposes and to specific audiences.With its emphasis on listening and responding to natural speech, its encouragement to guess at meaning from context and to appreciate and interjJret idiomatic language, and its orientation toward issues that real people have real concerns about, Talk Radio has added a new dimension to our students' English language learning. It is their contagious enthusiasm that has persuaded us to put the program into published form, and it is to them, and to the WRKO talkmasters who have provided us with such rich, provocative material, that we dedicate it.Catherine SadowEdgar Sather