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Listening skills
The first title we looked at was Real Listening and Speaking by Miles Craven, Sally Logan and Craig Thaine (Cambridge University Press). This is part of the Cambridge English Skills series, a new four-level skills-based series for young adults and adults. It’s clear that the authors and publishers have made a big effort to make the material as “real” as possible. What you first notice when you listen to the CD is the range of accents, including authentic non-native English accents such as Indian, Spanish, Russian, Italian, Chinese and Japanese, so that students are prepared for the mix of accents they will hear in the real world. The publishers say they have even left in some genuine errors made by the speakers and flagged them in the audioscript.
All the audio we listened to sounded good to us. There’s also a lot of good material in the student’s book. These skills books are designed to be used either by the student working alone, or in the classroom with a teacher, and complete teaching notes will soon be available at the book’s dedicated website.
We liked Real Listening and Speaking, and if you’re on the lookout for a new reading and listening skills book, this one is full of useful material. The series syllabus is very closely linked to the CEF and the checklists at the end of each unit relate directly to the ALTE (Association of Language Testers in Europe) Can-do statements.
You have to agree that Sounds Good (Pearson Longman) is a great title for a listening skills book. The blurb on the back cover says it “helps learners develop a wide range of listening skills needed in social contexts and academic contexts”. The book series, written by Ken Beatty and Peter Tinkler, has a topic-based functional syllabus that covers the same themes over four levels. Each theme is divided into four topics over the levels, which build in complexity.
When we played the CD, we first noticed that most of the accents were North American, with other occasional native and non-native accents. This is definitely a book for teachers and students of American English.
Apart from the book and CD, Sounds Good also promises online interactive audio exercises and podcasts. The online material is free to access so if you’re interested in the book you can sample some of the material first. We weren’t sure if the podcasts were true podcasts as there is no way of subscribing to them, but they do have a very authentic feel, which makes them different and extremely useful. Each podcast comes with a PDF worksheet that can also be downloaded and printed, making it a valuable online resource.
The Sounds Good package includes a teacher’s resource CD-ROM with editable unit quizzes and tests, editable versions of the scripts, and a PowerPoint teaching tool that allows sections of the book to be displayed on a screen. This is particularly useful for displaying and checking answers.
In previous issues we have praised the English for Academic Study series (Garnet Education – University of Reading). Once again the publishers have come up with a winner with English for Academic Study: Listening by Colin Campbell and Jonathan Smith.
You get the audio on a DVD, which is a great idea. The audio/video are all extracts from lectures. Many of these are based on transcripts of authentic lectures given at the University of Reading as part of normal degree programmes for British and international students. They are from a range of academic fields – investment banking, development economics, marketing, psychology and linguistics. And there’s also variety in the nationality backgrounds of the lecturers.
The book’s units are divided into two sections; macro-skills and micro-skills. The macro-skills tasks include making use of lecture introductions, note-taking and recognising the structure of lectures. The micro-skills include recognising words that are spoken quickly and are not stressed, recognising where one spoken word ends and the next begins, and word stress.
This book is very clear and would be easy to use for a teacher without a lot of experience with teaching academic English. The tasks are good, there’s a wide variety of topics, and there are transcripts at the back of the book. In fact, the material on the DVD was so enjoyable that we continued watching it after we’d finished reviewing the book.
It’s not so easy to give an opinion of the audio in All Clear 2, Listening and Speaking “With Collocations” by Helen Kalkstein Fragiadakis (Thomson Heinle) because we had no CD to listen to.
The original All Clear idioms text came out more than 20 years ago. The book’s main focus is on “high-frequency American idioms [in] meaningful contexts to develop speaking, listening and pronunciation skills”.
Although the title says that this is a book to practise listening and speaking skills, it seems to be more a book to teach idioms. It does so through listening texts, but the emphasis in these texts is on embedding a high number of idioms before going on to focus on their meaning. The listening texts themselves are all in the form of conversations, so there isn’t much variety in the listening type. And because of the need to include a high number of idioms, some of the conversations seem a little unnatural.
The book has eight lessons on themes such as “at a party”, “in class”, and “on the streets”. There’s prediction and a gist listening task in each unit, but the listening skill isn’t exploited to the full. For example, follow-up comprehension is done while the students are listening and also reading the transcript. There are then several pages of work on the idioms, followed by practice exercises that deal with related grammar. There are also opportunities to use the new idioms in speaking exercises, and there’s pronunciation work. A couple of nice features are the cultural information related to the topic and the follow-up Internet search ideas.
This book seems most suited to a special course on teaching idioms or as supplementary lessons to general English courses.
Listening Advantage by Tom Kenny and Tamami Wada (Thomson Heinle) completes this look at new titles. We only had the self-study CD to listen to and there were no transcripts at the back of the book to consult, making it difficult to give an opinion of the listening material.
This is another American English title. The book is divided into 12 lessons on themes under four general headings – “Daily Life”, “Places and Things”, “People I Know”, and “Hopes and Dreams”. The book has some nice features such as conversation strategies (uh-huh, mm-hmm, etc., and intonation and stress), a pronunciation section with the catchy title “Catch it!”, and a “Try it out” section that provides practice opportunities.
Many listening books are labelled as “listening and speaking”, so you’ll find information about some other recent titles in our feature on speaking skills, which is still available to read at its-teachers .
