Successful overseas students

Well, the pictures may not be very good, but I think the ideas they show are very important. We finished our summer course by thinking about the habits of successful overseas students. I think the most important things to take away from your summer school are a positive mental attitude and an awareness of how you can continue to improve your language skills.

Many students have commented that they want more listening practice and that we don’t do enough in class. There is never enough time to do everything you want in class, so it may be true that listening is often one of the things overlooked. But, you can listen outside class! The link today is to the online lectures provided by the Self-Access Centre for Language Learning at Reading University. This is a wonderful collection of real lectures given to English language students at Reading, complete with clearly typed transcripts so you can read what the lecturer says (after listening!) when there are things you did not understand. What I really like about these lectures is their authenticity (which means they are real) and they are accessible to everyone – you don’t need to be an expert on the topic to enjoy the lecture, they are aimed at a general audience. Here’s the link to these lectures.

Don’t forget to subscribe to my posts by e mail – you will receive the posts direct to your inbox (and of course you won’t receive anything else!).

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.

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.

Academic Listening

When I drive to work I often listen to BBC Radio 4 in the car. Again and again I am struck by what a great resource this is for students. At the moment there is a fascinating series of lectures on China being broadcast in a series called ‘The Reith Lectures’. Every year the BBC invites leading figures to give a series of lectures on radio and these lectures are called ‘The Reith Lectures’ in honour of Sir John Reith, the first director-general of the BBC. I have mentioned this resource before because the BBC holds archives of these lectures which you can listen to online, and they have the transcript too!

This year’s lectures are about China, its history and its relationship with the west. I have a lot of Chinese students and I have found this year’s lectures riveting. (New word? Don’t rush for your dictionaries – try to guess the meaning from the context. If you guessed very interesting then you are correct!) I am going to show you the link to the page for this year’s series of Reith lectures where you can listen to these lectures. If you are Chinese and wanting to improve your listening skills then there is no excuse for not listening to these lectures – don’t you want to know what westerners are saying about you?! The only thing about this page is that you cannot open the transcript and listen to the lecture at the same time – so listen first, then read if you need to, then listen again. If you want to read and listen at the same time then you’ll have to copy and paste the transcript into a word document which you can look at as you listen. Here’s the link to the Reith lectures on the BBC.