Listening

Discover ways to improve your listening skills including online dictations, and general and academic listening resources.

Quick tips for listening practice

  • Any listening material with a transcript may be used for dictation practice.
  • Prepare mentally before you listen—what do you already know about the subject? What words and topics are likely to come up?
  • Listen several times to the same passage—first for the main idea, then for detail.
  • Try to guess the meaning of unknown words from context.
  • Use transcripts to check your understanding after listening.

Read more listening tips

Dictations for EAP

This website is designed for PREPP and the EAP programme. Practise listening and writing, following the themes studied in class.

Beginner Intermediate Advanced NZ content

English Dictation

Listen to short elementary and intermediate level dictations at slow or normal speed, then check your answers. From the Learn English Network.

Beginner Intermediate

English Club Dictation

Hear short dictations at normal and slow speed, from elementary to advanced level.

Beginner Intermediate Advanced

Contemporary topics

A companion website with streaming videos for the book series (3rd edition) in the LLC's Self-access Library. It may be used on its own for listening practice.

Beginner Intermediate Advanced

Yale lectures

Authentic lectures from Open Yale complete with videos, transcripts, and downloadable audio files in a huge variety of subjects.

Advanced

Victoria University public lectures

The university's public lecture series—older lectures are available here but may not display correctly on all computers.

Advanced NZ content

University of Reading lectures

A wide range of lectures from this British university with comprehension questions and transcripts.

Intermediate Advanced

TED Talks

Search for inspiring talks on a subject that interests you. Find interactive transcripts, often in multiple languages.

Advanced

ESL News—New Zealand

Listen to recent and topic-based New Zealand news, spoken slowly and clearly, with transcripts.

Beginner NZ content

Listen a minute

Short listening tasks in a wide range of topics with transcripts, gap-fill exercises and downloadable worksheets.

Intermediate

BBC six-minute English

Short listening tasks about interesting topics, with downloadable audio and transcripts. Set up the podcast!

Intermediate

Breaking News English

Graded news articles, recordings, and communicative activities uploaded daily.

Beginner Intermediate Advanced

Elllo

Listen, watch, and learn! Comprehension tasks and transcripts in many different accents—both native and non-native. Updated twice a week.

Beginner Intermediate Advanced

Chasing Time English

This six-episode drama series comes with videos at two levels of difficulty (Lower and Upper Intermediate), subtitles, and plenty of activities.

Intermediate

LingoHack

Authentic news video clips by BBC Learning English, with transcript and word list.

Intermediate