Task Listening

Task Listening aims to develop the listening skills of students who have had little exposure to authentic spoken English. It is suitable for lower-intermediate and also more advanced students whose listening has been developed primarily as a means to a grammatical or structural end. Each of the twenty-six units consists of a short tape recording and related tasks. The recordings are of people speaking at normal speed in everyday situations. Each unit has as its theme a setting or situation in which listening plays a major part, for example, at an airport listening for flight announcements or at a travel agency being told about different means of transport. In each case, having completed the necessary language work, students listen to the tape and extract the information necessary to complete a simple task, such as labelling a picture or filling in a grid. Related reading and writing tasks are provided as a follow-up to each listening task. Task Listening aims to help students to sift out utterances of relevance and ignore redundant features, a skill vital to efficient listening at all levels of language learning.