1.3. ELI 592: Understanding Spoken English

ELI is a kind of English classes, which help non-native English speakers to improve their English ability; hence ELI is neither mandatory nor graded as the business school. It just grades students’ performance with “Satisfactory” or “Unsatisfactory.” I took an English listening class titled “Understanding Spoken English” with one credit.

For most non-native English learners, improving listening ability is the first necessary step to increase the learning in the U.S. as they learn everything in English. They cannot understand what native English professors speak especially when they speak very fast, utter something, and make American jokes.

The class was designed for those who struggle to understand native-English speakers. The main strategy is very simple; listen as much as you can! The problem is that implementing the strategy is very tough. So, the professor told us many listening resources from the beginning levels to daily topics through professional ones. Also, she encouraged students to write down what they listened to and what they felt difficult to understand. These memorandum helps the professor to give some appropriate advice to her students.

My learning after taking this class was very important to me. I learned listening needs less effort and helps me to get any information at a faster pace than reading books or browsing the internet. I preferred reading books to get any information to listening to something before, but now I always go to YouTube to search for meanings of unknown words. 5 years or more before, YouTube was a terrible website as its contents were piracy or useless. Now, good YouTubers and enthusiastic teachers in any field have posted many videos to explain esoteric terminology or whatever, making YouTube one of the valuable resources to learn something new.