Real Lives Real Listening Intermediate

 Real Lives, Real Listening: 

Aims
The main aim of the Real Lives, Real Listening series is to provide busy teachers with readymade
listening materials which will effectively train, rather than just test, their students in
listening.

A parallel aim is to boost students’ confidence in their listening skills by exposing them to authentic texts.

A further aim is to introduce students to the grammatical structures and lexis which are typically used in spoken English.

The series reflects the latest academic theories on the process of decoding listening input and
the importance of authentic listening practice in language acquisition. The series also reflects
our new awareness of the huge differences between spoken and written English highlighted
by recent research on spoken English corpora.
Authenticity
Unlike the listening texts typically found in coursebooks, each text in Real Lives, Real
Listening is 100% unscripted. This means that students are exposed to the features of spoken
English which they encounter outside the classroom and generally find so daunting. These
features include assimilation, elision, linking, hesitations, false starts, redundancy and
colloquial expressions.
The Real Lives, Real Listening series is carefully designed to include both native and nearfluent
non-native English speakers, reflecting the fact that most of the English which is spoken these days is between non-native speakers of English.

Content
The series is at 3 levels: Elementary (KET/PET), Intermediate (FCE/CAE) and Advanced
(CAE/CPE), and each book has 5 listening texts.

The first three listening texts in each title are accompanied by a wide variety of focused exercises from which the teacher can make a selection, depending on the needs of their students.

The final two listening texts are for revision purposes. Here the speakers recycle, naturally, the lexis and grammatical structures found in the previous three texts. Each book contains verbatim transcripts and useful glossaries.

Extensive piloting of these materials has shown that students at all levels experience a huge
sense of achievement when they find they can actually understand a native or competent nonnative
speaker talking at a natural speed. The Real Lives, Real Listening series provides them
with that opportunity.

This book is at Intermediate level, and is suitable for students ranging from upper-elementary to intermediate
levels. The first three main units are graded in terms of difficulty from easier to more challenging.