Academic Listening Strategies: A Guide to Understanding Lectures (Michigan Series in English for Academic & Professional Purposes)

Academic Listening Strategies offers additional listening comprehension practice and strategies for understanding lectures for students who are currently enrolled in a college or university. The exercises in this text, together with the lectures and short talks on the accompanying DVDs, will provide students with many opportunities to practice effective listening strategies.

Unit 1 begins with a diagnostic exercise to help students identify areas of lecture comprehension that may be most difficult for them. In Unit 2, students are introduced to some key bottom-up features (sound or word-level patterns) in everyday speech and given helpful strategies to begin unscrambling the stream of language that they will encounter in lectures. Unit 3 gives students a detailed look at common patterns in lectures and presents additional strategies that will help them to understand definitions, opinions, and jokes.

By the end of the book, students will gain the skills necessary to:
" Prepare for lectures
" Listen more effectively during lectures
" Recognize what information may have been missed
" Compensate for missed information with methods other than reading and rereading the assigned texts.

The video component includes four entire lectures, as well as several lecture segments and shorter informal talks. Also included are short audio selections of academic speech from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). All selections demonstrate actual and authentic speech in university lectures. All in all, more than 4 hours of listening material is offered on the three DVDs.

Three DVDs are packaged with the book: DVD 1 includes Units 1 and 2; DVD 2 includes Unit 3; DVD 3 includes the Additional Practice Unit.