Hello everybody, hi. This is Todd the teacher from ELLLO, and we are on speaking tip number nine - almost at the end. And, now, we are going to look at running commentary. This is kind of a fun thing to do, and you can do this with the practice activities that we have in our fluency - listening fluency course, or you can also do this with the movie or the news or anything. It's an easy way to practice both listening and speaking. And running commentary means you run the audio, and then you pause it, and then you give a commentary. Sometimes, you'll see people do this on DVDs, where they'll talk about the movie, talk about a movie scene.

So, it's a very easy thing to do to just practice giving comments about what you hear. And, also, it's a good speaking communication strategy. So, when people talk, it's often good to give comments about what they said - you don't take over the conversation, you just give a comment. They continue talking, but you just comment on what they are saying. This shows that you are interested in what they're talking about.

So, I will do a running commentary. It might seems strange because it's me on the audio - I'll be talking about myself, but you should get the idea. Ok, so, here we go. So, I'm going to do a running commentary on activity number 306 - the past tense.

'Hello. I'm going to talk about my day.'

Cool. Let's hear it.

'Today was a very busy day. I cleaned my house. I did many things. I washed the dishes.'

Ooh, I hate washing dishes!

'I swept the floor. I washed my clothes, so I did - my laundry.'

You know, that's the one thing I love doing. I love doing laundry. I don't know why. I think it's fun.

'I ironed my shirts.'

I do not like ironing my clothes. Actually, I hate it. I would rather put my clothes in the dryer.

'After that, I folded my clothes and I put them away.'

Nice. Good man.

'So, I basically cleaned up everything in my house. I even vacuumed the floor and wiped the windows.'

I have to admit that's one thing I never do. I never wipe my windows. It's really bad.

Ok, so, that would be a running commentary. And it's a really easy way, again, to practice listening and speaking. And you can even do it without talking. For example, if you're on the train - you're going to work or something - you can just pause and think of a comment in your head. But a running commentary is a very good way to be active with what you are listening to. And you can pause - you need to pause so you can think of your thought and just hit play and continue. And that's it. So that was speaking tip number 9, running commentary. Highly recommended, it's a lot of fun. And, again, you can do it with the activity files in ELLLO, or you can do it when you watch the news, when you watch a - some speech or something like that on TV, on YouTube, so there's lots of ways that you can do it. And that's it - speaking tip number nine.