There are a few good websites where you can practice your listening skills:
- Academic Earth — full lectures from top professors around the U.S. Some are up to an hour, but others are short (e.g. this series from Stanford on “The Future of Human Health”)
- iTunes U
- ResearchChannel at YouTube — great interviews and programming
- UWTV.org (lectures from the University of Washington)
- TED — is an incredible website with lectures, talks, presentations and performances by leading thinkers, professors, inventors, and artists from around the world. Start here!
- N.C. Live’s Media Collection has links to video from PBS (public television) and other sources, most of which is close-captioned (subtitled).
- MICASE (Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English) — self-study exercises based on real samples of conversations and lectures from the University of Michigan
- GO Cognitive (University of Idaho) — video interviews with important researchers in Cognitive Psychology and Neuroscience. Well produced and fascinating! Great for education and practice.
- Science Friday — videos and podcasts from the public radio show, Science Friday.
- Arlyn Freed’s ESL-EFL Listening Resources is an excellent collection of links to different listening websites for English-language learners.
- News Reports and Practice exercises
- Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab — not all of this is academic, but some will be useful
- A list of other websites with video
In addition, I also recommend these textbooks, which you can study by yourself:
- Julia Salehzadeh, Academic Listening Strategies: A Guide to Understanding Lectures (University of Michigan Press, 2005) – book and DVDs [don’t buy the book without the DVDs!! Available from the publisher: http://press.umich.edu/esl/]
- Feak, Reinhart, & Rohlck, Academic interactions: Communicating on campus. (University of Michigan Press, 2009). Available from online sources and the publisher]
Do you have a good resource to recommend? Leave a comment below!
Nigel Caplan 