读者和听众，大家好！
Readers and listeners, greetings!
If you would like to practice speaking and/or listening with a short passage from 枝丫, here are Mandarin Chinese and English recordings and a transcript of several sentences forthcoming in 第七章 Chapter 7.
Research on second language acquisition suggests engaging in the following learning activities with a short passage might be useful. Links are to a current, related research article.
Pre-listening. According to Kajiura et al., (2021), "Fast-rate listening with pre-listening transcript reading improves L2 [targeted second language] listening."
Statistical learning/passive listening. Listening to audio in the target language while doing other tasks is termed “statistical learning (SL), the unguided, automatic extraction of regularities from the environment through passive exposure.” (Alexander et al., 2022)
Shadowing. According to Takeuchi et al. (2020), "Shadowing is defined as a listening act or task in which the learner tracks the heard speech and repeats it as exactly as possible while listening attentively to the incoming contextual information."
Frank's recording of the excerpt from Chapter 7 in Mandarin Chinese is included in this post.
Anne's recording of the sentences in English using Vocaroo is linked to here. She has a standard American accent with a hint of the South. After reading the sentences, to assist with shadowing, Anne includes what she and Mary, our editor, term “building sentences.” For each other, we read and record a sentence in sequential bits in hopes of assisting the person’s working memory take in and organize novel content.
Transcript of excerpt from 枝丫：第七章 Twig: Chapter 7
老板把一个文件从他的文件夹里拿了出来。突然，文件掉到了地上。大家都看到老板的手指在颤抖。
Lǎobǎn bǎ yīgè wénjiàn cóng tā de wénjiànjiā lǐ nále chūlai. Tūrán, wénjiàn diào dàole dìshang. Dàjiā dōu kàn dào lǎobǎn de shǒuzhǐ zài chàndǒu.
The boss took a file out of his file folder. Suddenly, the document fell to the ground. Everyone saw the boss's fingers trembling.
Update 05/16/2024: An error in the pinyin was corrected and tones on 来 and 上 were changed to neutral tones.
Here is an early look at the Chapter 7 PPT slide.
And here is the illustration by Derek Zheng that will accompany 第七章：
享受！Xiǎngshòu! Enjoy!
Note: The term "chorusing" is used in second language learning. Searching with the term "chorusing" produced no results related to language learning in PubMed. In Google Scholar, the term produced citations by one author, Olle Kjellin, starting in 2004. The latest related citation was a small scale study conducted in 2014 on synchronous speech. Given the uncertainty of its currency or efficacy, "chorusing" was not included in the above list.
Twig 枝丫 zhīyā is a serialized fantasy novel written in Simplified Chinese characters for intermediate level readers.
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