Exercise 1

Click here to go to a website from Oxford University Press.

Print out a number of worksheets and do the assignments. Since you can access the files yourself, you can replay the fragments as often as you like, but also try to listen to the fragment in one go. When you have finished, you can check your answers in the key. If you have made many mistakes, listen to the abstract again and read along with the text.

Exercise 2

When you have completed the assignments, print out the transcript, if you have not done so already. Listen to the file again and underline the words that you hear clearly. In your notebook, make five columns and write down the underlined words in the correct column.

It should look like this:

Now, do you see which words are given the most attention? This also means that there are words that do not get that much attention (or stress, as it’s also called) (among them the weak forms that were mentioned in podcast about the rhythm of the English language). Those are the ones you may easily miss when you listen to English.