Self - Assessment of Online Listening to Podcasts

I have listened two podcasts: „Worldwide, a Language Dies Every Two Weeks“ and „Children??s Doctors Group Calls for Early Medical and Educational Intervention for Autism Spectrum Disorders“. I have taken them from the website http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/.

These two podcasts were not very dificult for me. I could not find the level of these podcasts but in my opinion the level of English was upper-iintermediate, so i could easily understand what speakers were talking about. Moreover speakers were not speaking very fast and because of that i could hear every single word. Both speaker‘s accent were American. I have listened both podcasts twice and then I have understood them completely. The reading of a transcript helped me to understand the contents because if I have not understood some words, I looked up the meaning of unknown words in a dictionary.

I think my ability to understand authentic speech is quite good because I have not had serious problems with listening these podcasts. I am not saying that I am compeletly prepared for our exam listening paper because I still need to work very hard on listening if I want to do my best during this exam.

There are many ways to improve my listening skills. Fistly, I should listen to podcasts as often as possible because it is really helpfull. Secondly, listening to authentic cassette recordings in class is helping as well. When I am watching English films on TV I am improving my listening skills as well,so I am going to do that as often as possible. Of course it is very helpfull to travel and work abroad for my English but this is quite impossible at the moment.

In my opinion if you really want to change something in your life, to improve yourselfe, you can make it quite easily – if there is a will- there is allways a way!