Academic listening

You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t been posting very frequently recently. That is a sign of a busy time! Now that most of the end of year marking is done I hope there’ll be some more posts.

My students will be bored with me telling them to read all the time, well today for a change I am going to tell everybody to listen. Like reading, listening to English will tune your ear and your brain into the language. As you listen to something interesting you focus on the message and you forget that you are a language learner. When this happens you are relaxed and you will subconsciously be acquiring a lot of language. Many language learning experts believe that this is the most important part of language learning – some even say that all language learning should be like this, and that conscious study is a waste of time!

Today’s link is to a great site where you can watch a huge variety of academic videos of lectures and TV programmes. When you visit the site you should try to find something on your subject, or something that genuinely interests you. You can do this by doing a subject search. If you want to watch something on climate change you will find some programmes by following the Science subject link and then scrolling down the alphabetical list of topics to find some videos on Climate Change. This incredibly useful resource is called Research Channel and you can find it here.