Shadowing Practice: How a Super El Niño affects the global climate - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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Strange things are happening around the Pacific Ocean right now.
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A 10-foot great white shark spotted dangerously close to a group of children swimming north of Los Angeles.
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Hundreds of hungry pelicans are flocking to Peruvian ports and coastal markets.
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The worst winter storm front to hit Chile in more than a decade.
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And all signs point to El Nino as a major reason why.
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The number of climate models are calling for the possibility of a Super El Nino brewing this summer.
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El Nino is not uncommon.
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This climate phenomenon occurs every few years, but this one could be different.
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It's been called a potential super or Godzilla El Nino, and it could fuel extreme and dangerous weather conditions globally through 2027.
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So now seems like a good time to explain the science behind El Nino, how strong this one might be, and how it could impact our global ecosystem.
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And El Nino gets declared when trade winds shift and temperatures rise in the Pacific Ocean.
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The trade winds along the equator are constantly blowing from the east to the west.
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They're called the trade winds because hundreds of years ago, the sailing ships could rely on those steady winds to move them across the Pacific.
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And they essentially pile up warm water in the far western Pacific.
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When they slow down, even briefly, they can allow that warm water to slide backwards under the surface of the ocean.
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All of that water will become warm as those trade winds weaken.
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And then when they hit about a half a degree centigrade, about one degree Fahrenheit over the central Pacific,
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then our team here will declare an El Nino event.
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Noah says the El Nino has officially begun.
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El Nino is a part of the naturally recurring climate pattern known as the El Nino Southern Oscillation or ENSO.
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That acronym ENSO, El Nino Southern Oscillation, it encompasses the entire El Niño and La Niña system.
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La Niña is the opposite phase with cooler than average surface temperature.
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And generally we see swings between the two.
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They tend to recur on a two to seven year cycle.
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There's also a neutral phase in the middle when neither El Niño nor La Niña are present.
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So El Niño is just a normal part of this constantly replaying cycle in the ocean.
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But what's not normal is how strong scientists are predicting that this current El Nino could become.
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We do have a grading system.
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We actually grade it based on the sea surface temperatures in the Central Pacific, greater than 2 degrees Celsius, which is about 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit.
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It's a very strong El Nino.
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We have an 81% chance of being in a very strong El Nino.
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That's the highest odds I've seen for that.
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The atmospheric response scales with that.
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So if that temperature is much,
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much warmer than average, then that's a stronger El Nino and has a stronger influence over global atmospheric circulations.
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A contributing factor to the strength of this El Nino is what's known as a Kelvin wave,
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a 9,000-mile-long warm water mass moving across the Pacific that's a whopping 7.5 degrees Celsius
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or 13.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the average.
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That warm water moving under the surface, it rises up as it moves to the east
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and provides a source of heat for the surface and therefore feeds an El Nino event.
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We've only seen El Ninos with this much strength a few times in the past.
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From 1877 to 1878, an El Nino caused a famine that killed millions of people.
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From 1982 to 1983, a superpowered El Nino brought drought to nearly every continent and destructive floods in North and South America.
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And another from 1997 to 98 caused widespread record rainfalls, mudslides, wildfires, and coral bleaching.
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So what can we expect with the strength of the current El Nino continuing to gather over the coming months?
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The World Meteorological Organization's seasonal outlook is predicting temperatures and rainfall far outside of global averages.
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And a stronger El Nino means more intense shifts in weather.
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It makes a parade of storms more likely to happen.
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Because El Nino can shift rain away from where it normally falls, it's not just that wetness or dryness increases, but where it increases.
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In places that aren't necessarily used to dealing with those conditions.
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You can get a lot of these kind of pattern changes.
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There's parts of western Chile, the Atacama Desert, that, you know, they don't get rain maybe once every 25 years, but they do when it's in El Nino.
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More wetness into Southern California, across Arizona, Texas.
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The potential risk of extreme weather events is higher given the strength of this El Nino.
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Droughts in Southern Asia, flooding in the Americas, and hurricanes forming in the East Pacific Ocean.
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They can bring a lot more rainfall to Peru, Ecuador, and Chile and have devastating consequences there.
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We see drier conditions in Indonesia, which can contribute to wildfires.
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The far eastern Pacific can be, the water can be quite a lot warmer than average,
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and that has a lot of implications for fish and for species that depend on fish.
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Those sharks that are showing up on the beaches of Southern California, they're heading north of their usual habitat because their normal hangouts have gotten too warm,
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and the fish that they eat are migrating to cooler, more nutrient-rich water.
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And as this El Nino gathers strength, it appears it will continue through the winter when it's expected to peak.
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North America, southern Australia, and some other regions like that, we expect those impacts to be greater in the winter.
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More rain, especially in the southern tier of the US.
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Historically, we have seen snowier winters during El Nino, largely because of that increased moisture.
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But even with that foresight, we still face a test of what some are calling one of the strongest El Ninos ever recorded.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “How a Super El Niño affects the global climate”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: Nino, Pacific, southern, warm, degree. This video has 66 sentences and 989 words to shadow. The speech runs for 6:19. The speaker talks at a natural 156 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 78% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| rainfall noun | The amount of rain that falls on a single occasion | |
| recur verb | /ɹɪˈkɜː/ | Of an event, situation, etc.: to appear or happen again, especially repeatedly. |
| wetness noun | /ˈwɛt.nəs/ | The condition of being wet. |
| wildfire noun | /ˈwaɪldˌfaɪər/ | A rapidly spreading fire, especially one occurring in a wildland area. |
| atmospheric adjective | /ˌætməsˈfɛɹɪk/ | Of, relating to, produced by, or coming from the atmosphere. |
| drought noun | /ˈdɹaʊ̯t/ | A period of unusually low rainfall, longer and more severe than a dry spell. |
| declare verb | /dɪˈklɛɚ/ | To assert or announce formally, officially, explicitly, or emphatically. |
| predict verb | /pɹɪˈdɪkt/ | To make a prediction: to forecast, foretell, or estimate a future event on the basis of knowledge and reasoning; to prophesy a future event on the basis of… |
| acronym noun | /ˈækɹənɪm/ | Generally such abbreviations, including those pronounced as individual letters (initialisms such as "TNT"). |
| centigrade noun | A centigrade scale for temperature having the freezing point of water defined as 0° and its boiling point defined as 100° at standard atmospheric pressure. | |
| dangerously adverb | In a dangerous manner; so as to cause danger. | |
| devastate verb | /ˈdɛv.ə.steɪt/ | To ruin many or all things over a large area, such as most or all buildings of a city, or cities of a region, or trees of a forest. |
| dryness noun | /ˈdɹaɪ.nəs/ | A lack of moisture. |
| encompass verb | /ɪnˈkʌmpəs/ | To form a circle around; to encircle. |
| equator noun | /ɪˈkweɪ.tɚ/ | An imaginary great circle around Earth, equidistant from the two poles, and dividing earth's surface into the northern and southern hemispheres. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| pile up verb | To form a pile, stack, or heap. |
| slow down verb | To decelerate. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've seen · We've only seen · have gotten |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | Celsius, which is · Indonesia, which can |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 6 contractions and reduced forms, such as they're, aren't, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: implication /ˌɪmpləˈkeɪʃən/, circulation /ˌsɝkjʊˈleɪʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: atmospheric /ˌætməsˈfɛɹɪk/, implication /ˌɪmpləˈkeɪʃən/, ecosystem /ˈikoʊˌsɪstəm/, circulation /ˌsɝkjʊˈleɪʃən/, historically /hɪˈstɔɹɪkli/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like rainfall, recur, wetness.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.