In China, students on pre-sessional courses have very little chance to make contact with the real English-speaking world, and it is not very easy to obtain authentic materials for training in extensive listening. The next best thing is to make use of news programmes broadcast by the BBC World Service or the Voice of America. This we did in a number of graded steps: from asking the students to report the number of items in the day's news programme at the beginning of training to discussing details of some of the items later on. The results were very satisfactory. After two months, students' listening ability had improved significantly.
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A 1984 study studied this question.
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