Listening / Reading Comprehension: Oprah's Show to End

Reading & listening comprehension for today:  Oprah's show to end.

This article really does represent the end of an era.  Oprah absolutely changed and dominated daytime television in America and around the world.

As usual, you have choices of both audio file and text.  You can also find a collection of useful vocabulary definitions at the bottom of the page.

Long live the BBC!

Listening / Reading Comprehension: Monty Python in US Election Row

Monty Python?  In a US Election row?  It must a listening / reading comprehension from the BBC.

Once again you can work through this exercise in different ways: you could try just listening first; then try only reading, and finally listening and reading. 

Perhaps read it first and then listen to it; see if you can pick out the things you read, when you listen to it.

The exercise also comes with a useful list of vocabulary definitions at the bottom of the page.

Listening / Reading Comprehension: Social Notworking

Let's kick the actual blogging off with a link from the excellent BBC World Service site: Social Notworking.

There are a number of different ways you can approach this exercise:  you could try listening to the audio without looking at the text.  You could read the text without listening to the audio.  You could then try doing both at the same time.

It's also very useful to read as you listen and just concentrate on the pronunciation of the different words.  The connection between English spelling and pronunciation can be very confusing, even for native speakers!

Finally, don't worry if you don't understand every single word.  You can, of course, go through the whole article with a dictionary, if you want to.  But the most important thing is to understand the article in general: small steps every day are better than large steps once a week.