Monday organization tips. Effective reading and listening practice. Part 1. Sometimes students try to listen and to read a lot in English (watch favourite sitcoms/ films/ read magazines etc), but time pasts and they realise that they do this ineffectively. If you have such feeling this post can help you a bit. One approach to listening and reading activities is to divide them to EXTENSIVE and INTENSIVE practice. In this post you can find some general tips on how to practice EXTENSIVELY. And next Monday I'll cover the Intensive practice tips. . 💡It’s usually useful to check your current level of reading and listening. Talking about General English you may use reading/listening IELTS sample papers. . 💡THE LENGTH of audios & texts for EXTENSIVE PRACTICE depends only on the amount of your free time and on the time period that you can stay focused. In general, it should be quite long. . 💡THE LEVEL of audios & texts should be LOWER or the SAME as yours. They shouldn’t be extremely difficult. . 💡The good criterion of choosing the material is the number of new words, try to avoid the ones with lots of new vocabulary for you. EXAMPLE If you want to check more than 8 words per paragraph in the dictionary it’s not a good idea to use this text for extensive practise. . 💡For audios the speed is also important. It shouldn’t be too fast, you should feel comfortable and understand the most part of it. EXAMPLE If you have B2 level - use B1-B2 texts/audios . 📕For reading I can recommend to use graded readers books (Oxford Bookworms , Penguin Readers, Black Cat Publishing etc.) . 🎧For listening you can search for podcasts for students of your level. . 🎧Audios for the graded readers books will do as well. Hope that this mini article will help you to read big texts and listen to long audios in more effective way;) If you have more ideas on what texts/audios to use for that kind of practice, please, share them in comments down below😉
