Shadowing Practice: TEST 30 PART 3 - LUYỆN TẬP VÀ THỰC HÀNH LISTENING - TỰ HỌC VSTEP - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
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Now turn to part 3.
138 sentences
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Now turn to part 3.
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You will hear 3 different talks or lectures.
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In each talk or lecture, there are 5 questions.
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For each question, choose the correct answer A, B, C or D.
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You will hear the talks or lectures only once.
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Now, open your question paper and look at Talk or Lecture 1.
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You now have 30 seconds to look through the questions and the options in each question.
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Now, we are ready to start.
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Listen carefully.
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Listen to a talk to university students.
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This lecture series is intended to help students at this university benefit more from their studies here.
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The topic of tonight's talk is how to manage your time.
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Time is a very important commodity when you are a university student.
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There simply never seems to be enough of it to go around.
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You will need to attend classes,
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study, complete homework assignments, work on research,
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eat, sleep, perhaps hold down a part-time job,
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and maybe actually find time to relax for a moment or two.
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So, a very important skill for you to learn is to manage your time.
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If you manage your time wisely,
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I think that you'll find there is enough of it to go around.
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One valuable tool in time management is to monitor how you spend your time for a week.
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Then, after you spend this week monitoring your time,
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you can evaluate what you have done with your time and learn to make the best use of it.
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During this week of personal time monitoring,
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you should divide each 24-hour day into 15-minute blocks,
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so each day has 96 blocks of time.
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Then write down how you spend each 15-minute period.
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I know that it is bothersome to write all of this information down for a week,
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but the benefits of such a study can be great.
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At the end of a week,
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you will see just how much time you have spent productively and how much time you have not.
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The specific assignment that I have for each one of you
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is to spend the next week conducting your personal time monitoring study.
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At the end of this week,
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you should make an appointment with me to discuss your results.
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Now, open your question paper and look at Talk or Lecture 2.
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You'll have 30 seconds to look through the questions and the options in each question.
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Now, we are ready to start.
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Listen carefully.
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You will hear a tutor talking to two business students called Philip and Janice about their research on managing individuals.
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Now, I guess the two main things to remember here are to identify individual talent and then to utilise it.
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So Janice, you were looking at identifying different talents in workers.
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Do you think this is easy for managers to do?
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Well, currently teamwork is in fashion in the workplace,
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and in my opinion the importance of the individual is generally neglected.
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What managers should be targeting is those employees who can take the lead in a situation
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and are not afraid to accept the idea of responsibility.
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That's true, Janice, but unfortunately many managers think the entire notion of encouraging individuality amongst their staff is far too hard.
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Yes, that may be true,
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but I think one of the most important tasks of managers is to consider the needs of the individual on one hand,
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and group cooperation and conformity on the other.
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It requires creative thinking on the part of management to avoid tension.
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So, Janice, what kind of people do you think companies should be looking for?
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Well, it has to start from the very beginning,
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when companies are looking for new employees.
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When the personnel department is choosing between applicants,
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they need to look for someone who's broken the mould and can think for themselves.
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Instead, people making these decisions often use a range of psychological tests to see
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if a person is a problem solver or will do as they're told.
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I'm not convinced these qualities are actually the most important.
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So do you think being a good team player is overrated?
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No, it's not overrated.
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You do need to learn the rules and learn them fast.
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No individual can get around this if you're working in an organisation.
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So how should managers deal with this?
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Rewards.
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Rewards.
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When an individual demonstrates the behaviour the organisation expects,
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some kind of incentive can be given.
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What's important here is that this happens right at the beginning,
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so new recruits learn the rules of the system immediately.
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Also, the incentive should be something the individual actually wants,
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and this isn't always just money.
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Come back to you, Philip.
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You were saying that recognition of good performers is essential.
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What else should managers be looking for?
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Well, managing people means you not only have an understanding of your employees,
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but you also recognise the culture of the organisation.
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In fact, for some organisations,
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creativity and individuality may be the last thing they want to see during working hours.
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Very true.
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Yes, but managing people isn't as easy as it looks.
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For example, change in the workplace can be quite tricky,
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especially if there's a need to increase profit.
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And at times like these,
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managers may have to give priority to profit rather than individual staff needs.
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Yes, and that creates difficult situations for people.
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Yes, but what's important is that managers are able to deal with quite high levels of personal stress.
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During times of change, they should be thinking not only about the strain on their staff,
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but take time out to think of themselves.
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Absolutely.
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So what are the implications of that?
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Now, open your question paper and look at talk or lecture three.
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You now have 30 seconds to look to the questions and the options in each question.
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Now, we are ready to start.
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Listen carefully.
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You will hear a talk about a project on the wildlife found in City Gardens in Britain.
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Good morning.
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Today I'd like to present the findings of our Year 2 project on wildlife found in gardens throughout our city.
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I'll start by saying something about the background to the project,
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then talk a little bit about our research techniques,
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and then indicate some of our interim findings.
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First of all, how did we choose our topic?
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Well, there are four of us in the group,
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and one day while we were discussing a possible focus,
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two of the group mentioned that they had seen yet more sparrowhawks,
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one of Britain's most interesting birds of prey,
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in their own city center gardens,
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and wondered why they were turning up in these gardens in great numbers.
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We were all very engaged by the idea of why wild animals would choose to inhabit a city garden.
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Why is it so popular with wildlife when the countryside itself is becoming less so.
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The first thing we did was to establish what proportion of the urban land is taken up by private gardens.
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We estimated that it was about one-fifth,
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and this was endorsed by looking at large-scale usage maps in the town land survey office,
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24% to be precise.
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Our own informal discussions with neighbors and friends led us to believe
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that many garden owners had interesting experiences to relate regarding wild animal sightings,
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so we decided to survey garden owners from different areas of the city.
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Just over 100 of them completed a survey once every two weeks for 12 months,
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ticking off species they had seen from a proforma list,
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and adding the names of any rarer ones.
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Meanwhile, we were doing our own observations in selected gardens throughout the city.
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We deliberately chose smaller ones because they were by far the most typical in the city.
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The whole point of the project was to look at the norm, not the exception.
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Alongside this primary research on urban gardens,
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we were studying a lot of books about the decline of wild animals in the countryside
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and thinking of possible causes for this.
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So what did we find?
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Well, so much that I just won't have time to tell you about here.
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If you're interested in reading our more comprehensive findings,
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we've produced detailed graphic representations on the college website,
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and of course any of the group would be happy to talk to you about them.
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Just email us.
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This is the end of part three.
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You'll have five minutes to check your answer and transfer your answers onto the answer sheet.
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Thank you.
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About This Lesson
In this lesson, you will engage with listening exercises designed to enhance your understanding of English lectures and discussions. Focused on time management and individual talent in the workplace, this segment will challenge your listening skills and comprehension. By participating in this practice, you will gain insights into effective time allocation as a university student and the importance of recognizing individual strengths in a team environment. This will not only improve your listening skills but also your ability to comprehend and respond appropriately in academic and professional settings.
Key Vocabulary & Phrases
- Time management: The process of planning and exercising conscious control over the amount of time spent on specific activities.
- Commodity: Something that is useful or valued, such as time in the context of managing tasks.
- Personal time monitoring: Keeping track of how you spend your time to evaluate productivity.
- Individuals: Single human beings, particularly in discussions about talent and responsibility in teams.
- Teamwork: The collaborative effort of a group to achieve a common goal.
- Responsibility: The state of being accountable or to blame for something; a critical quality in leadership and teamwork.
Practice Tips
To maximize your learning from this segment, utilize the shadowing technique while listening to the lecture excerpts. This method involves mimicking the speaker's intonation, pronunciation, and rhythm. To effectively employ shadowspeak while practicing:
- Begin by listening to a brief segment of the lecture, then pause it to repeat what you heard, trying to replicate the speaker's tone and pace.
- As the video features a conversational tone, focus on capturing the emotional context conveyed by the speakers. Pay attention to their emphasis on key points to enhance your expression when speaking.
- By following this method, you can effectively practice your IELTS speaking practice skills and boost your confidence in handling academic discussions.
- Consider revisiting challenging sections multiple times to refine your abilities. The speed of delivery can be fast, so allow yourself to practice until you can comfortably keep up.
- Finally, engage with the material regularly. Repeated exposure to real-life situations presented in the lectures will improve your overall listening skills and comprehension in English.
Embrace the challenge, and remember that by using resources like learn English with YouTube, you are taking significant steps to improve your English proficiency. Happy learning!
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.
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