英语中级听力课程Lesson 28

Lesson-28英语中级听力课程Lesson 28Robert: Now, one of the biggest hurdles to crossin getting a good job is the interview. There'sno getting away from it, because in nearly everycase when you apply for a job you will be called for one, or sometimes even two, interviews. It'squite natural that you might also be dreading it;in fact, some people dread them so much they neverturn up at all. What I want to try to do today is to take some of the sting out of the interviewand get you over what I call 'job interview jitters' to show you how you can make a good impression and even use the interview to your ownadvantage. I mentioned two interviews earlier because some companies do a kind of screening interview first, where they try to find out whatyou're like and if you're suitable for the job before you go on to the main interview. This screening interview would probably be with someone from the personnel department, and I'd like now to show you on the video a couple of examples of these screening interviews, which Ihope will help to illustrate how to go about itand how not to. In the first, Walter Edwards ofthe personnel department of a biscuit factory inSouthampton is interviewing Anita Jones for a jobas a secretary.Walter: Come in, I'm Walter Edwards and you're Miss ...?Anita: Anita Jones, er, but my friends call meNita.Walter: How do you do, Miss Jones. Do please sitdown. Now, your application tells me you were born in these parts. Did you grow up here?Anita: Er, um, yes. Well, no. I was born here inSouthampton, but my dad, that is my father, worksin a bank so we, um, moved up north when I was fairly small, which is where I went to school and,um, then we moved back down here, which is why I live round here now, you see.Walter: Quite. And I see you've just completed a one-year secretarial course. Is this your firstjob application?Anita: Yes, er, well, no. I mean, I've had severalholiday jobs and part-time jobs but this is, orrather would be my first full-time job. I mean this is the first time I've been looking for one.Walter: Do you have any special reason for choosing this company?Anita: Oh, not really. I mean, er, yes, I was attracted by the money but that's not the only reason, of course. (Laughs.)Walter: I see. And could you tell me about your secretarial skills?Robert: Without going any further, I think we canall see that Anita is a very nervous applicant: hesitant and indecisive. It's quite clear that she is petrified by the whole idea of the interview, and her faltering and stammeringdelivery is even irritating for a Mr. Edwards whohas, after all, only a few minutes to find out about Anita and to see if she's the right one forthe job. Another important point to raise is appearance, which Anita obviously didn't take much care over. Dress is very important and you should never turn up in jeans and an old sweater if you're after a job in an office or a place ofwork where you will be meeting people, dealing with clients and that sort of thing. Clean, smartclothes are the order of the day, and try to avoidstage fright, like some nervous actor on the opening night of a new play. Job applicants oftenlook upon the interviewer as some kind of ogre who enjoys making interviewees squirm in their seats, a kind of figure to be looked up to andnotwill mind of attitude negative This revered.help in any way and will only destroy your self-confidence and ensure failure.Anita also mentioned money straightaway, which was bad and made her come across asbeing mercenary. The one question she did volunteer a lot of information about was her upbringing and that was all highly irrelevant. Before we move on, there's something else I wanted to point out and that was the way Anita moved. As she came into the room she sidled nervously up to the desk and wasn't quite sure whether to shake hands, sit down or what to do and kept looking nervously around her. Throughout the interview she fidgeted about andkept twiddling the strap on her handbag, which she clutched tightly to herself. Furthermore, she sat on the edge of her seat with hunched shoulders and a tense look on her face, all of which indicates to the interviewer she is someonewho can't handle pressure and responsibility andwho appears indecisive and unsure. You have to remember that you've got about ten or fifteen minutes to show what you're made of, and nomatterhow good you are normally, it's in these vital minutes that you must project the right image. Now we'll take a look at another interview and see what conclusions can be drawn from that one.beingis Simpson Louise excerpt, this Ininterviewed for a job with a book publishing firmby Audrey Maguire of personnel.Louise: I'm Louise Simpson.Audrey: Sit down, please, Miss Simpson. I'm Audrey Maguire.Louise: How do you do?Audrey: When you came in, did you happen to noticeall the building work going on?Louise: Yes, I did.Audrey: Well, that's our new office extension andwe're moving there within the month, so that's where you'd be working.Loiuise: Yes, I did read about it in the prospectus you sent me about the firm. I'm sure you're looking forward to the move.Audrey: Indeed, yes. Now I'd like to ask you oneor two questions about your previous experience,if that's all right?Louise: Go right ahead.Audrey: Have you had any jobs before?Louise: Yes, I worked as a secretary in a lawyer'soffice as a summer job, primarily to earn somemoney to see me through college, but I also gainedsome useful work experience into the bargain. While I was there I did secretarial work and alsotook a turn on the reception desk, to help out, and it was very enjoyable meeting people in thisway to vary the routine.Audrey: Did you like working in the lawyer's office?Louise: From the career point of view it was goodto get to know how an office works, but I've always wanted to be in publishing really, which is why I applied for this job.Audrey: Now, can you tell me ...Robert: I think we've seen enough to make the distinction between Louise and Anita you saw inthe previous slip. Louise gives a totally different image, an image of self-confidence without being too cocky, and she was conductingherself in a relaxed and friendly way. She talkedto the interviewer in a normal manner, which wasfluent and without the terrible 'ums' and 'ers'of Anita. She also gave the impression that she the with exchange information was there to She interrogated. than be interviewer rather wanted to know if the company was going to suither as much as they wanted to know if she would neat, and were sober suit them. Her clothes and relaxed she was being too frumpy, and withoutcasual without being too laid-back so that it taken had also she didn't care. She would appearthe trouble to read the prospectus she'd been sent, which didn't hurt at all. The basic point about an interview is that it shouldn't be a servant routine, a boss andquestion-and-answertwo together of but a coming session, personalities. It's the 'swan technique' which the on my in view, serene projects the best imagenow And like mad underneath. surface but paddlingI'd like to come to the problem of ...It is an election day and the Americans of all fifty states are going to the polls.Electionobservers have predicted a light to moderate turnout, of about forty percent. But some counties' election officials we talked this afternoon were more optimistic.I'm in Lamar, Colorado. It's raining.It's a very grey day. I think we are going to havea real good turnout if the weather doesn't getting worse.thein auditor county the I'mnorth-eastern portion of Aberdeen, South Dakota,Brown County, South Dakota. Our turnout in BrownCounty is absolutely fantastic at this point. Theweather is cooperating, is absolutely gorgeous,in South Dakota, sun-shining, crisp beautiful day. Couldn't have ordered anything finer? We are in Shelby, Montana, the county seat of Toole County. The weather is 59 degrees today,no snow anywhere in our area. It's beautiful. Nowindy. We expected a very good turnout today. And it's a small exemplar there.Thirty-six states will elect governors today, inaddition there are hundreds of local contests andbattle issues to be decided. But the control inthe United States senate remains the major item of national interest. A third of the senate, thirty-four seats, will be decided today. Republicans who have held their slim majority inthe senate for the past six years are defending twenty-two of those seats. Democrats need a net gain of four seats to win control. According tothe latest pre-election polls, the closest senate races were in these nine states, Washington, Idaho, North and South Dakota, NorthCarolina, Georgia, Alabama, California and Colorado. This would be the most closely watchedtonight as county election officials turn theirattention from watching the skies to counting theballots.Listening and UnderstandingA student learning English often finds the following problems when he listens to talks or lectures.Firstly, he doesn't always identify all the words correctly. I refer here to known words.i.e. words which the student would certainly recognize in print. Let's examine some of the reasons for this particular difficulty. In writing, there are clear spaces between each word;in speech, one word runs into the next. It's verydifficult to decide, therefore, where one word finishes and the next one begins.In writing, the words consist of letters of the alphabet. These letters have a fixed shape:they're easy to identify. In speech, however, vowel and consonant sounds are often very difficult to identify. Some of these sounds may not exist in the student's native language. Manyof them, particularly the vowel sounds, aregivendifferent pronunciations by different English speakers.Finally, some words in English, words like 'and' or 'there' or 'are' or 'will' are frequently pronounced with their weak or reducedform in speech. This is sometimes so short that non-native speakers, perhaps not accustomed to it, fail to recognize it at all. Many students, normalthe recognize don't example, forpronunciation / 5TErE / for the words 'there are'which occur at the beginning of so many English sentences. Furthermore, they encounter a similarproblem with unstressed syllables which are partof a longer word. For instance, think of the word'cotton', which is spelt 'c-o-t-t-o-n'. I'll repeat that: 'c-o-t-t-o-n'. Each letter is the same size; no difference is made between the first syllable 'cot-' and the second syllable '-ton'. In speech, however, the first syllable is stressed, the second is unstressed. The work is not pronounced 'cot-ton' but 'COTn'. Thesameis true for the word 'carbon', spelt'c-a-r-b-o-n'; it's not pronounced 'car-bon' but'CAR bn'.But I want now to come on to the second main problem; the difficulty of remembering what's been said. Again, the problem here is much less difficult in the written rather than the spoken form. Words on a page are permanently fixed in space. They don't disappear like words that are spoken. They remain in front of you. You can choose your own speed to read them whereas in listening you've got to follow the speed of the speaker. A difficult word, or sentence, on the printed page can be read again, whereas a word not clearly heard is rarely repeated. The listener, therefore, finds that he has to wordsthe identifying on hard so concentrate correctly and on understanding them that he haslittle time left to remember.In a foreign language his brain simply has too much to do. In his own language, of course,he's able not only to identify and understand thewords automatically but also he can often even predict the words which are going to come. His brain, therefore, has much more time to remember.Thirdly, I want to deal with a problem that worries most students in a lecture. The problem is this—they can't always follow the argument.This is, of course, partly due to the first two difficulties I've discussed. When you have difficulty in identifying or remembering words and sentences, you obviously won't be able to follow the argument. But even those students whocan do these two things perfectly well have problems in following a quite straightforward argument. Why is this? I'll suggest three reasonshere. Firstly, students don't always recognize the signals which tell the listener that certainpoints are important. Some of these signals willbe quite different from those employed in writing.Secondly, some students try too hard toeverything. When they come to a small understandbut difficult point, they waste time trying to work it out, and so they may miss a more importantpoint. Thirdly, students must concentrate very missmay therefore and notes taking on harddevelopments in the argument. But note-taking isa separate subject which will be dealt with in a later talk.There are, however, other problems thestudent is faced with, which I'd like to mentionbriefly.It's always a surprise to students to discover how much the pronunciation of English changes from one English-speaking country to another, and from region to region. Many lecturers from Britain have a B.B.C. type accent,the type of English associated mainly with the South of England and most commonly taught to non-native speakers. However, other lecturers will speak differently. To give an example / bQs/, / lQv /, / mQm / etc., as spoken in the south, are pronounced in Manchester and many other partsas / bRs /, / lRv / and / mRm /, Southern English / ^rB:s /, / fB:st /, / pB:W / are pronounced inYorkshire and elsewhere as / ^rAs /, / fAst / and/ pAW /. It's worth noticing that it's usually the vowels which have variants, though sometimesit may be the consonants. For instance, a Scotsman will roll his 'r's', whereas a Londonerwon't. So a lecturer with a particularly strong regional accent will cause non-native speakers considerable difficulty.Whether a student follows a lecture easily or not depends also on the style of English thetype of lecturer uses. By 'style' I mean the extreme at one to express an idea: English chosenit may be very formal, at the other colloquial more speaking, the even slang. Generally orstudent the it easier is for formal the style,says, who example, a lecturer to understand. Forwriter's the 'This is undoubtedly formally, the On readily understood. central point' will beother hand if he says, 'That's really what the have students many will writer's on about, difficulty in understanding.to the time factors, which I haven't Other discuss in detail, may also be involved. These is lecture at which the the include speed delivered, the rather common use of irony, the peculiarly English sense of humour, referencesculture, British knowledge of which presuppose aetc.All these factors combine to make it a formidable task for students to follow lecturesof aware helpful clearly to be comfortably.as much practice to the problems and get as understand to and listening possible in to tryingspoken English.。