Letting Things Go---Speed and Vocabulary Many English Language learners believe that the greatest difficulty with listening comprehension is that the listener cannot ____1____ how quickly a speaker speaks. They feel that the utterance disppear before they can ___2____ them out, whereas the words in a written text remain ____3_____ where the reader can glance back at them or reexamine them thoroughly. This frequently means that students who are learning to listen cannot keep up. They are so ___4____working out the meaning of one part of what they hear that they miss the new part. Or they simply ____5_____ a whole section because they fail to sort it out quickly enough. Either way, they ____6_____ . Another difficulty is that the listener is not always in a ____7_____ to get the speaker to ____8____ what has been said. And, of course, repeats cannot be asked for when listening to the radio or watching television. Choice of ____9____ is in the hands of the speaker, not the listener, although in some circumstances it is possible to stop the speaker and ask for ____10____. Sometimes listeners can get the meaning of a word from its ____11_____. But very often, for people listening to a foreign language, an unknown word can be like a suddenly dropped ____12____ causing them to stop and think about the meaning of the word and thus making them ____13___ the next part of the speech. In listening, it really is a case of “He who hesitates is ____14___!” Indeed, ____15____to listen to what is coming, and letting things that have passed go rather than ____16____ upon them, often gives surprisingly good results. Speakers often say things more than once or ____17____ them, or another speaker ____18____ what has been said. The listener who has not “stopped” to dwell on a half-missed point gets a ___19_____ or even third chance to fill the____20___ in the message he or she is receiving. In fact, when we listen, we actually listen with a ____21____. Although it is sometimes necessary to get detailed and specific information of the subject, it is, more often than not, quite enough for us to grasp the ____22___words and the main points. Students need to develop the skill of ____23___up with the speaker (even being ____24____of the speaker) even if this means letting parts which they have failed to sort out ____25____. Professor H. H. Stern says that the ____26____ language learner is the one who “can tolerate ____27____ and incompleteness of knowledge.” This is especially ___28____ of good listeners.