Listening to a lecture

It has come to my attention that some people are visiting English for University without subscribing! Remember if you subscribe to receive my posts by e mail you will get my posts direct to your inbox without having to come here all the time. I promise you that you will only ever receive postings from this site and you will keep up to date with all the great resources that I put up here.

As I am always pointing to other teachers’ resources on this site, for a change I thought I’d point to one of my own. Here’s a lecture I gave to students at Exeter University called Postwar Reconstruction and the Welfare State. It’s designed as a lecture for students on Academic English courses who need practise in listening and note-taking so the content is not too difficult and you should be able to follow it. It’s about how the Labour government rebuilt Britain after world war two by setting up the welfare state and implementing policies of nationalisation and full employment. It’s not a professional production! That means that I set up the camera and left it. As a result I keep walking in and out of the camera shot, oops. If you want to watch it then look at the powerpoint presentation which goes with it to help you follow the talk. It doesn’t sound like a very interesting topic but if you want to try watching then give it at least five minutes before you turn it off as I think you may well get interested if you give it a chance. Once you get interested in a lecture and concentrate on the content your language acquisition will really take off. The power point slides are here and the lecture is here. If you are good at manipulating windows on your computer you’ll be able to open the powerpoint slides and the video at the same time. If you can’t quite work this out or find it too cumbersome (awkward/difficult) then you could print out the slides.

Singular or plural?

A lot of good writing is spoilt because students do not know whether the subject of a sentence is plural or singular and so they make a mistake with the verb. This is quite understandable – it is not easy. For example:
The team has been picked and is ready for the match.
In this sentence the subject of the sentence – team – is a collective noun and although it is made up of several members they are acting as one unit. There is only one team. The subject is singular, so the verbs has been and is are singular verbs which agree with the subject.
However, look at this sentence:
Every day after practice the team has a shower and goes home.
If you think this sentence looks very strange you are right! In this sentence the team do these things individually, so the correct grammar would be:
Every day after practice the team have a shower and go home.
This means that some words are singular sometimes, and plural at other times, depending on the context. Which is why English can be such a hard language!
Here is a handy page from the Grammar Bytes website which talks about collective nouns, and another one from BBC Learning English.
When you’ve read those explanations try out this exercise on singular or plurals from Better English. Some collective nouns are always singular or plural even though they look like they shouldn’t be. In this case, keep your hair on, and just learn it!

University orientation

Of course language difficulties are only some of the problems that international students face. Hopefully students reading this blog will find lots of support from their colleges and universities in regard to other challenges such as finding accommodation and getting to see a doctor, but it is still difficult to draw the line between language difficulties and cultural differences that overseas students encounter when they study abroad. It’s important to spend time considering how university study in the UK (and other English speaking countries) is different to what you may have been used to and that is the reason behind today’s link from The Higher Education Academy’s LLAS website. The exercises which I am sending you to have the title: EAP: University Challenge: a short orientation and listening course for international students. Don’t try to do all the units in one go, but do settle down and try to get through unit 1 part 1 in one sitting. The unit is here.

Free university lectures online!

It’s quite easy to practise your ‘everyday English’ listening skills because you can hear English so easily on television and radio and on the street (if you are in an English speaking country that is!). However, it is harder to practise your academic listening skills which is why I’ve got this great link for you today. The link comes from a site called Lecturefox and has a big bank of really first class lectures from prestigious universities. I’ve just been watching a lecture entitled The City Car and it’s fascinating to follow. The City Car is a small car which you can use around town and when parked it folds up neatly into a row of other cars just as shopping trolleys slot into each other outside a supermarket. And like shopping trolleys the city car isn’t owned by individuals but just used and then left for the next person. Find a lecture that you like and watch it. Some lectures are videos (and those with videos have great slides too), some just audio and some have notes. This excellent resource for all sorts of students can be found here at Lecturefox.