Academic Listening - Part 4 - Lectures: the introduction | Текст песни

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• Academic Listening
• Part 4 - Lectures: the introduction

This is not an accurate word-for-word transcript of the programme.
Группа Learning English:
http://vkontakte.ru/club17650165
Продолжение транскрипта:
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/webcast/al_04.pdf

ANNOUNCER:
It’s time for Academic Listening - a series for students at English-speaking universities and
people who want to improve their listening skills. The series is presented by Susan Fearn.
Susan: You’re studying architecture.
It’s Monday afternoon – time for your weekly lecture with the Professor.
You find a seat at the front of the lecture theatre, and silence falls.
You know the introduction of any lecture contains important clues about what’s
to come, so you pay careful attention as the Professor begins.
CLIP: Professor
Good afternoon. Today’s session is the first of a series of three lectures on “Urban Planning”.
In this first lecture we’ll look at the important question of infrastructure when planning any
town or city; and then in the next two sessions we’ll turn our attention respectively to: public
building requirements and issues surrounding industry.
Now, infrastructure has been defined as 'the structure of a country'…
Susan: In the last programme, we saw that lectures tend to have a simple structure with
a beginning, a middle, and an end. Of these, we argued that the first section, the
introduction, is crucial because this is where the speaker sets the scene and
outlines the content of their talk
CLIP: Simon Williams
The introduction’s so important because it gives the students signals of how to interpret what’s
going to come up.
Susan: Simon Williams teaches English in the Language Centre at University College
London.
CLIP: Simon Williams
It’s going to put the lecture and those following it into context, e.g. in a series on urban
planning the first lecture might be on infrastructure: transportation, power etc; the second one
on public buildings; the third one on industry… so the student has an overview and gets the
relation from week to week between the content of a lecture and the series as a whole.
Susan: The first part of a lecture has a number of functions. Speakers use the
introduction to set the lecture in context: in terms of what’s gone before and
what’s coming later in the series. They may also indicate the relative
importance of today’s topic within the subject area as a whole.
Now, we’ve said before that students can prepare for a lecture by reading
through the course outline and reflecting on the title of the lecture. The
introduction is a good opportunity to start matching your predictions with
reality.
Simon Williams advises students to listen particularly for clues on how the
lecture will be organised.
CLIP: Simon Williams
The first section is important for alerting students how many parts a lecture is going to contain.
There usually an introduction, a conclusion, and the crucial part is to know how
many sections there are in the middle… That's very important in helping
students to revise or to use their notes.
Susan: In the introduction you’ll also find details about the specific content of today’s
lecture, and how the speaker intends to approach the subject. There are often
other helpful elements to be found.
CLIP: Simon Williams
The sort of ingredients you might find in the introduction – apart from the lecturer giving an
idea of the organisation so the student knows when different sections are finishing and starting
– perhaps the definitions of key terms, the scope of the lecture, how much work students will
have to do by themselves after the lecture is over. And perhaps why the lecturer is interested –
it's often stimulating to know why people are enthusiastic about a subject, and what personal
relationship they’ve got with it; and perhaps why the students should be interested themselves
– e.g. it’s topical or examinable.
...

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