Introduction
i
Listening to longer talks, and talks about your own subject, will help prepare you for listening to lectures, so you will need to do more independent listening in your own time.
Additional audio-visual resources
To help improve your extended listening, you can access highly relevant lectures and talks on two websites – the University of Reading’s SACLL site, and TED Talks.
Self-Access Centre for Language Learning website (University of Reading) This has more than 30 lectures given to international students on pre-sessional courses at the university’s International Study and Language Centre on academic and general topics; many of these are by distinguished lecturers in disciplines such as construction management, food science, investment, psychology, finance and management. Each lecture is 35–50 minutes long and comes with transcripts and tasks, both of which can help your listening.
Here is a guide to using the material effectively. ■ Find the website by typing in the URL
www.reading.ac.uk/sacll or entering ‘SACLL lectures Reading’ into Google or another search engine.
■ Check through the lecture list, read the brief descriptions and choose one that interests you. ■ Click the task button for your chosen lecture to get a list of open questions about the lecture. ■ Read the questions and check any unknown vocabulary – reading and understanding the questions will help you anticipate the lecture’s content.
■ If necessary, do a quick Google search on the lecture topic to gain some more background knowledge. On degree courses, doing background reading before lectures is essential to full understanding.
■ Listen to Part 1 of the lecture. Here, the speakers typically a) introduce the topic, b) say why it is important and c) explain how they will organize the lecture. Understanding this is essential to understanding the whole lecture (see Unit 2 on lecture introductions).
■ As you listen to Part 1, answer the questions in the task. ■ Check your answers to the questions on Part 1. If you have answered these correctly you will be well placed to understand the rest of the lecture. Otherwise, it is a good idea to listen again with the answers in front of you.
■ Listen to the rest of the lecture. You could do this in parts, but it may be better to listen to the whole lecture without pausing, as you will need to develop the stamina needed for listening to long talks, rather than the shorter extracts that appear in this book.
■ If you found parts of the lecture particularly hard to understand, or had problems answering the questions correctly, it is worth a) looking at the answers and listening again or b) reading the transcript while listening. This can help you understand why you have misheard or misunderstood.
■ Spoken English can be harder to understand than written English, due to things like word and sentence stress (Units 2 and 4), word boundaries (Unit 5) and weak forms of words (Unit 6). One way to practise is to listen to a very short extract of a lecture, then try to write down exactly what the speaker says. Listen several times to do this. Then check the transcript and see if you have heard correctly. This may show you why you are having problems following spoken English.
TED Talks
Speakers on this interesting site include world-famous academics, writers, thinkers, medical researchers, politicians, investors, cooks, businesspeople and artists. The talks are informative, up to date and thought-provoking. They vary from three minutes to more than an hour in length. You will hear different accents that will help you prepare for study at a culturally diverse university.
Here are some suggestions on using this website effectively. ■ The URL is
www.ted.com, or just enter ‘ted talks’ into a search engine. ■ You can access the talks in different ways. The top of the homepage has a menu including ‘Themes’, ‘Speakers’, ‘Talks’. You can search for a particular speaker, e.g., Bill Gates, or the ‘Themes’ button may offer a more interesting way to access talks – giving you a choice of talks on related topics.
Listening 7
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