This 112-page guide has been developed to improve listening skills so that
verbal communication becomes easy and fun. The workbook gives the student the
flexibility to both listen to and read the dialogues, enhancing his/her
ability to develop listening techniques and gauge skill level. It also gives
the student the opportunity to listen to native speakers using different tones
of voice. The workbook is in PDF format, which offers the flexibility to work
with it directly on the computer or to print out a portable hardcopy.
Concepts covered include:
- Main idea:
In some conversations, learners might recognize a few words. But do they understand
the main focus of the discussion?
- Meaning:
This type of exercise will have one speaker say something to another speaker,
and afterward learners will be asked to explain what the speaker was saying.
- Action:
This section develops the learner's ability to identify the action in a conversation:
What have the speakers done? What are they doing? What are they planning to
do?
- Inference:
An inference is the act of making a conclusion based on factual information.
In some conversations, speakers will suggest something but not state it outright.
This section will help the learner to draw a conclusion from hints in the
conversation.
- Tone of voice:
People often give clues to what they mean by their tone of voice. Most often
they do this by raising the pitch of their voice to emphasize a certain word.
This lets other people know what words are the most important in a sentence.
- Words that sound the same:
This workbook will test how well the learner understands the conversation
by assessing his/her ability to differentiate between similar-sounding words.
- Vocabulary:
This workbook includes tables and verb conjugations of the most commonly used
English words. Other topics include irregular verbs, past participles, slang,
compound words, word pairs, confusing words, and time references.
- Idioms:
Most languages have idioms. Idioms are phrases that are not to be taken literally;
they are expressions that mean something different than the meanings of the
words that make them up. This workbook includes a handy table of alphabetically-organized
idioms.