Abstract:

The authors of the article share their experience of enhancing listening skills while teaching students of political sciences. The focal point of their efforts is proper names relevant in political discourse, which are characterized by a number of problems related to their perception. The authors propound a new method “News Anchor” to overcome these problems.

This method enables students to develop skills in perceiving proper names that frequently occur in political discourse. Obviously, proper names relevant in political discourse include the names of people, names of countries, as well as organizations, abbreviations, acronyms and even numerals. It is not surprising that the audio material, which features fragments of political discourse (monologues of political figures; TV and radio interviews with heads of states; political debates, discussions, etc.), reflects the realities of the professional domain of political scientists and is replete with proper names.

The authors start by outlining the corpus of proper nouns relevant in political discourse, which comprises the following groups:
1. Nation states and political figures.
2. Regional organizations (EU, AU, MERCOSUR) and others.
3. Informal clubs: G7, G10, G20, G77.
4. UN (UN Agencies: IMF, WB, WHO, WIPO; UN programs and funds: UNICEF, UNESCO; UN principal organs: General Assembly, Trusteeship Council, ECOSOC and others).
5. Other international intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations: WTO, IAEA, Interpol, Greenpeace, and others.

Then the authors systematize the causes of the difficulties that the learners face while listening and combine them into three groups:
1. Deficient learner knowledge of political science.
2. Learners’ wrong ideas of proper names pronunciation.
3. Peculiarities of the speaker’s pronunciation (accent, speech defects, etc).

Besides, the same proper names (names of countries and organizations) may sound different in American and British English due to discrepancies in their phonetic systems, reading rules and accentuation.

Then the authors describe their experince in using “News Anchor” method to enhance listening skills. This method was successfully tested on second-year stu¬dents of Moscow St¬ate Linguistic Unive¬rsity. The description of the experience is accompanied with the guidelines of arranging learners' work to ensure their successful performance.

In the course of the role-play one student assumes the role of a news anchor at the political talk-show, while the other students act as the audience. The task of the anchor is to present a 10-minute news coverage and to answer the questions of the audience. The news coverage which is prepared in advance should contain as many proper nouns as possible and should be based on or remind of a real-world political event.

Finally, the authors provide statistics testifying to the efficiency of their “News Anchor” innovative method.

Keywords:

Listening skills, perception, political discourse, proper names, news coverage.