The Real Lives, Real Listening series is an exciting new
approach to training our students in listening. It is designed
to reflect the latest academic theories on the importance
of authentic listening in language acquisition. The series
also reflects our new awareness of the huge differences between
spoken and written English raised by recent research on spoken
English corpora.
The RLRL series will eventually feature over 100 native and
competent non-native English speakers, including speakers
from all the main regions of the British Isles, Australia,
Canada, the USA and South Africa, along with speakers from
Africa, China, The Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece,
Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Norway, Russia, South Korea,
Sweden and Turkey.
The first three volumes are My Family, A Typical Day and A
Place I Know Well. Subsequent volumes will include Health
Issues, Careers, Life Changes and Leisure.
Each volume is divided into three levels: Foundation (KET/PET
and Skills for Life Entry Levels 1 and 2), Intermediate (FCE/CAE
and Skills for Life Entry Level 3 and Level 1) and Advanced
(CAE/CPE and Skills for Life Levels 1 and 2).
Unlike the listening passages typically found in coursebooks,
each passage in RLRL is 100% unscripted. This means that students
are exposed to the features of authentic spoken English which
they encounter outside the classroom and generally find so
daunting. These features include assimilation, elision, hesitations,
false starts, redundancy and, of course, colloquial expressions.
The first three listening passages in each book are accompanied
by a large number of exercises which the teacher can select
from, depending on their students’ needs. In addition
to standard, non-threatening listening comprehension exercises,
there are listening training exercises focusing on minimal
pairs, sentence stress, intonation patterns, etc. These are
followed by language development exercises which reinforce
the lexis found in the passage.
The final two listening passages are for revision purposes.
Here the speakers recycle naturally the lexis and grammar
found in the previous three passages.
There is a full transcript at the end of each unit, together
with a useful glossary.
Students experience a huge sense of achievement when they
find they can understand someone in the target language speaking
at a natural speed. The aim of the RLRL series is to provide
busy teachers with ready-made listening materials which will
effectively train, rather than just test, their students in
listening
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The Real Lives, Real Listening book contains five units featuring
native and competent non-native speakers of English.
The first three units are graded from easy to more challenging
according to accent, speed of delivery and complexity of language.
Each of these three units follows the same format:
Part 1 Pre-listening
This section gives students the opportunity to familiarise
themselves with the speaker’s voice – a process
known as ‘normalisation’. At Intermediate Level
this section nearly always includes a Factfile giving the
teacher useful information about a speaker’s country,
region or city.
Part 2 Listening comprehension
The main aim of this section is to increase students’
confidence in their listening ability. A variety of non-threatening
exercise types are used to focus not just on what
was said (i.e. the product of listening),
but on how it was said (i.e. the process
of listening).
At Foundation Level wherever practical two sets of listening
comprehension exercises are provided to accompany each passage.
The first are for students with literacy problems and the
second are for students without literacy problems.
Part 3 Interesting language points
This section appears in the Teacher’s Book at Foundation
Level and in both the Teacher’s Book and Student’s
Book at Intermediate Level. Here attention is drawn to interesting
grammatical, lexical and phonological points which have occurred
in each passage. Great care has been taken to provide teachers
with clear explanations and further examples of all the points
raised
Part 4 Further listening practice.
The focus of these exercises is on listening training. Exercises
include phoneme discrimination, dictation of chunks of speech
from the passage, identifying words pronounced less clearly
because of because of assimilation and elision, marking sentence
stress, etc.
Part 5 Language development practice
This section recycles useful lexis from the listening passage.
Part 6 Transcript and glossary
Each unit ends with a full transcript which includes every
‘um’, ‘er’ and pause. In the Teacher’s
Book the transcript is followed by a glossary in which key
lexical items are fully explained.
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There are currently three titles available: A Typical Day,
My Family and A Place I Know Well. These are currently available at two different levels, Elementary (KET/PET, Skills for Life Entry Levels 1 and 2) and Intermediate Level (FCE/CAE, Skills for Life Entry Level 3 and Level 1)
(KET/PET, Skills for Life
Entry
Levels 1 and 2) |
Each title has a Teacher’s Book with an audio CD and
a photocopiable Student’s Book. The costs are as follows:
Teacher’s Book with audio CD
£15.00
Photocopiable Student’s Book £20.00
Orders are dispatched within 48 hours.
To view a typical Teacher’s Book unit, DOWNLOAD
HERE 
To view a typical Student’s Book unit, DOWNLOAD
HERE
(FCE/CAE and Skills for Life
Entry Level 3 and Level 1) |
From the back covers:
‘Sheila Thorn’s work leads the field in helping
learners to engage with real speakers in real contexts. An
outstanding resource for teachers and students alike.’
Professor Ron Carter
‘The author’s wonderfully innovative approach
to listening continues
in the intermediate level books.’
Professor Jennifer Jenkins
Exciting new development!
In response to requests from teachers, the photocopiable
Student’s Book at Intermediate Level contains a CD featuring
the entire text of the Student’s Book as a Word document.
This enables the teacher to download the Student’s Book
onto a computer and
a) present selected exercises using a whiteboard.
b) photocopy only those exercises they consider most useful
for their students.
The costs are as follows:
Teacher’s Book with audio CD
£20.00
Photocopiable Student’s Book with a CD of the text as
a word document £25.00
Orders are dispatched within 48 hours.
To view a typical Teacher’s Book unit, DOWNLOAD
HERE
To view a typical Student’s Book unit, DOWNLOAD
HERE
It is also possible to purchase a Self-Access Centre
version of all the books in the Real Lives, Real Listening
series. For more information, just send an email to Sheila@thelisteningbusiness.com
or give me a call on 020 8521 8309 (0044 20 8521 8309 from
abroad), afternoons only.
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