Many of my students tell me that they find it really difficult to follow their lectures. Some of them tell me that they think they can only understand 25% of what the lecturer is saying! Now that is a worry!
My advice to my students is to try and do something about it. The most important thing for students to understand is that when they listen to lectures they need to be ACTIVE and not PASSIVE. There are a number of things that students, especially international students, should be doing BEFORE, DURING and AFTER the lecture.

Before the lecture students need to prepare! If you just turn up to the lecture not knowing what the lecturer is going to talk about then you are not helping yourself. You need to find out as much as possible about the lecture as you can before you attend it. Are the powerpoint slides available to view beforehand? Do you know the vocabulary for the subject? Can you read the relevant parts of the textbook before the lecture?

During the lecture you need to be active! Sit at the front so you can hear properly and so you can pick up all the facial expressions and mumbles and off-hand comments from your lecturer. Use an audio recorder if you can. Try to judge what is important and what is not important. Note down things that you can’t understand to ask the lecturer later.

After the lecture form a study group with your friends. Sit down together and swap notes. Talk about what you understood and what you didn’t understand. Find time to ask the lecturer about things you are not sure about. Write up your notes in longer hand so that you can understand them later.

I would strongly recommend students to work through the Listening to Lectures part of that great resource Prepare for Success which you can find here.

Once a student asked me why I posted things about everyday English on my website for Academic English. I explained that I thought that you couldn’t hope to improve your Academic English without improving all aspects of your English. If you work on your everyday spoken English skills this is going to have a positive impact on your writing skills too in the long run. If your everyday spoken English is stronger then you are going to find it easier to mix with other students, and you are going to find it easier to join in with university life in general – which is very important!
So international students at university should be working on all areas of their English and today’s link is to a regular podcast from the BBC World Service’s Learning English service called The English We Speak Podcast. You should sign up to receive this regular podcast and make listening to it part of your weekly English language improvement routine. You can subscribe to the podcast here!

Rain rain go away, come again another day! A couple of weeks ago it was announced that we had a drought in most parts of England. Of course as soon as the news was out, it has been raining constantly and we have floods all over the place. In previous years April has been the best month but this year it is the wettest month for years!
Don’t forget TED.com for practising your English. This is a truly wonderful site. If you are preparing for an examination with a listening component – like IELTS for instance – then you should be doing lots of listening practice. I would strongly recommend looking at TED.com and browsing through the list of topics. You can use the search facility to find something that you are interested in. Then just listen. If you have problems you can use subtitles in any of about 45 languages. There is an interactive transcript so you can read the transcript and play the video from any point that you choose. The cost of this? It’s free! There are lots of sites which charge you money for similar services! If you haven’t seen TED.com before then why not start by listening to Jay Walker giving a presentation about English learning? It’s here.