As we were doing some listening exercises on Saturday and I mentioned the BBC site, I thought I'd include a link to some listening this week. This is a series of audio files on the topic of culture, made for learners of English. Have a listen to week 4. Click on 'Download mp.3' , then 'open'. You'll need to be quite patient because it'll take a minute or two for the file to download. Have a listen and try to answer these questions as you do.
1. What's different about a business meeting in the West and the Middle East?
2. What's different about communication in the West and Japan?
3. What did researchers find more inportant in communication, facial expression, intonation or the words?
4 How is Namibian culture described? (Coincidence - Nelson was talking about Namibia on Saturday!).
Then you can download the script and check your answers. You could also download the files to an mp3 player and listen to them on the bus, for example. There are other episodes you could listen to as well, and other files on different topics at bbclearningenglish - webcasts. Hopefully after a bit more practice you won't suffer so much!
Happy listening , Carolyn
3 comments:
Hello
I have heard the dialogs and I confess i like to do that, although that claims a reasonable effort from me to understand which I'm listening to.
So,my answers to your questions are the following:
1) In the West, the people who is participating at a business meeting go directly to the main subject and they'll try do not loose time with other unnecessary topics.
In the Middle East, at the beginning the hosts promote like a social meeting, offering a glass of water or a cup of tea, speaking about social local events or archeological sites and natural wonders and passed a few minutes they'll start to discuss the subject of the business meeting.
In Portugal, I think, there are great similarities with the Arab people behavior about that.
I'm going to complete my answers:
2) In the west, the communication is more informal and includes a lot of emotion - this is specially strong in the South Europe's people and in the South America -, in Japan the antithesis.
3)The researchers found that the facial expression is, by far, the most important aspect in communication, followed by the intonation which is responsible for almost 40% of the meaning and, finally , at the last position the classified the words.
4)Namibia is described like a silent culture.
Very interesting and surprisingly for me. I recognize I know almost nothing about Nabimiam people, their history and culture.
I'll see you tomorrow.
Isabel
Thanks for your comments Isabel. It's interesting that you think that Portuguese culture has some similarities to Arab culture.Could it be a leftover from the Arab occupation all those years ago?
Carolyn
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