TODD: Hey, everybody. Hi, this is Todd, the teacher from ELLLO and this is Speaking Tip 8. We are going to do my favorite listening/speaking activity.

I say this tip to my students all the time. They say, “I want to practice listening. I want to practice speaking. What can I do?” Well, I say, do the five-in-one speaking challenge and this is how it works.

Listen to something. It can be a movie, TV, anything. Listen to something and take notes. Can you get five bits of information in one minute? That’s your challenge. Can you get five things, your five bits of information in one minute? And I recommend you take notes to make it active.

So I will do it. I’ll actually hear myself talking but I will listen to a small talk, a short talk, I should say, and I will take notes. After I get five things, I will stop the audio and repeat what the person said. Or not repeat, I will rephrase, restate, what the person said. So here I go.

TODD (Audio): Hi. In this lesson, we will talk about learning English. So if you want to get really good at English, you need to study a little bit every day. Unless you study a little bit every day, you probably won’t see that much improvement. But as long as you study every day, you will some improvements, for sure. Now if you want to have really good pronunciation, then you should listen to lots of naturally spoken English. This is the best way to learn pronunciation naturally. The more you listen, the better your English will be. But if you listen to English that is really difficult or above your level, you won’t see as many gains. You won’t see as many improvements.

TODD: Okay, so I’ll stop it there. Now notice, this is a two-minute bit of audio and I’ve stopped it about 40 seconds in, and I have five things that I heard. So I stop the audio, stop the movie I’m watching or whatever. Now I’m going to repeat what I heard. The topic is about learning English and the speaker says you should study every day, right. So that’s very important. Unless you study every day, you’re probably not going to see that much improvement, so studying every day is the best way. Also, if you want good pronunciation, you should listen to natural English. That’s very important. Also, if you listen to something that’s too difficult, you won’t have improvement because you won’t be hearing things, you won’t be understanding things. And that’s it. Those are my five things. That’s it.

So then what I would do is continue and then listen again, five more things. So this is a way to make listening active count. How quickly can you get the information? Can you get five bits of information in one minute? Now notice the last tip. The last tip was that you need English that’s not too difficult, that’s at your level. Well, in this course, that’s what we do. We have lots of audio about a grammar point at different levels. So the audio should be at most students’ level. It’s not too difficult and it’s not too easy.

So we made it to help you out. And that’s it. That’s the five-in-one challenge. Now again, you can do this with anything. You can do it with a movie you watch. You can do it with any audio on ELLLO. You can even do it with a song when you listen to music. It’s a really good way to be active, keep yourself active, to practice speaking so you don’t get sleepy, and to learn listening, speaking, everything, at the same time. Alright, that’s it. And talk to you soon.