I’ve posted quite a few listening lessons on this blog, and up to now they were all worksheets meant to be used by a teacher in class. This time I’m sharing an online self-study lesson, for B1 level and higher, that allows learners to explore the features of connected speech and train listening decoding at their own pace. The lesson is based on a snippet from an interview with Malcolm Gladwell, an American journalist, at Toronto Public Library.
The web tool that I used to build this lesson is still in a bit of experimental stage (e.g. unfortunately right now you can’t save or print out your answers, and there might be other minor snags). Still, I hope that it will be useful for learners who need to train themselves to understand fast authentic speech.
If you try the lesson, I’d be very grateful for your feedback.
Olya Sergeeva's ELT blog 
Hi Olya
Fantastic work, look fwd to testing this when i get back from holidays 😀; also a small reminder for interview about your tool? 😀
Ta
Mura
Hi Mura,
Thanks! Actually I’m afraid that since posting this we’ve introduced some kind of critical bug so the main functionality (playing the videos) isn’t working at the moment – will let you know when it’s up again. I know it seems a never-ending story by now, but I’m going to talk about this tool at the BESIG conference in November, so at least we’ll have to finally get it sorted by then. 🙂 Can I get back to you re the interview right after that?
Hi Olya,
Okay will do; good luck with squashing that bug!
Turned out not a critical bug but deprecated API (they deprecated the player that we were using – will need to rewrite part of code).