During your university studies you will not only be asked to do a great amount of reading and writing. You will also find yourself listening to lectures a lot of your time.
Academic listening can be very different from the way you listen to other people in everyday life. In a lecture you will have to listen for a long stretch of time, therefore you will need to concentrate well. You will not always get the opportunity to ask when you haven’t understood something. You will listen to lecturers talking about very specific subject matter and have to decide which information is most relevant to take notes of. You will need these notes later to revise for exams and write essays.
The following activities give you some training in comprehending lectures and taking notes. Don’t worry, you don’t have to listen to a whole lecture. For the start, it’s best to listen to some short talks to become familiar with the language and the style of a lecture.
The video extracts below are not taken from a typical lecture but from an online talk show. However, the English level is quite similar to what you can expect from a university lecture. In the short videos you will listen to Kate Fox answering several questions from the Internet audience about emotions in Britain and around the world.
Before you do an exercise, you should take a minute and think about how you would answer the question.
When you have finished an exercise, click on "Home" and you are directed back to the listening page.
If you want to watch the whole talk show with Kate Fox, click here.