Hunter TS#11

September 28, I met with Marco and we worked on listening.  He had been working on a project in which he had to interview the vice president of a bowling club here on campus.  Part of his assignment was to record the interview and write down the dialogue between himself and the vice president verbatim.  Naturally he had difficulty understanding certain sections of the recording.  We listened to it fully together twice through, having him point out the different parts that gave him trouble.  We then went back and would listen to this trouble sections separately and try and break down what the interviewee was saying.  The vice president used many idiomatic and slang expressions that were naturally confusing to Marco such as "solid" meaning: something which is good.  It didn't help that the interviewee used many filler sounds but I decide to take advantage of the opportunity and have Marco differentiate between a filler sound and an actual word.  On numerous occasions the interviewee would stop half-way through a sentence and start over to better restate his idea.  This also provided a bit of difficulty for Marco.   After explaining what the interviewee was doing and why he was doing it, Marco was able to easily recognize and understand the phenomena as it occurred in other parts of the recording.