Here are two useful resources students can access to practise their academic English listening skills: TED Talks and 60-Second Science.
TED Talks
TED Talks make ideal listening practice for English for Academic Purposes students because they are typically 10-20 minute presentations.
- Listen to the talk and take notes
- Find the transcript and read it as you listen again
As well as listening to the contents of the talk, carefully pay attention to the speaker’s presentation skills. How does the speaker organise the information to make it clear for the listeners? How does the presenter use his/her voice to make the talk more interesting?
A useful feature of the TED Talks site is that you can filter the videos according to topic. So, for example, you can easily find talks about BUSINESS or talks about SCIENCE or talks about DESIGN and TECHNOLOGY.
60-Second Science
Don’t you have the time or motivation to listen to a 10-20 minute talk? Then why no try a 60-second one? 60-Second Science is a series of very short podcasts by Scientific American. You can listen to them, read the transcript and even download them if you want. Just like TED Talks, you can also filter the 60-Second Science podcasts according to topic. So you could, for example, listen to podcasts about HEALTH or podcasts about SUSTAINABILITY.