Ways to Improve your Listening Skills for English Exams

- How can you improve your listening skills in English?

And what's the best way to prepare for the IELTS Listening

and the TOEFL Listening?

Well, join me today with my special guest to find out.

(upbeat music)

Hello.

My name is Keith and I run the Keith Speaking Academy

and the YouTube channel,

English speaking success

as well as a new channel, English speaking success shorts,

go and check it out.

So listening, right, is a really important skill

when you're communicating in English.

It's even more important if you're preparing for an exam

like TOEFL or IELTS.

If you don't know these exams, right?

TOEFL and IELTS are similar in that they are tests

to measure your level of English

if you want to go and study in a university abroad

or possibly to immigrate to an English speaking country

and also for some professional occupations

that need a certain level of English.

So today, to help you with your listening skills,

I'm joined by Josh MacPherson who is a teacher like myself

and he's also the head of TST Prep

which is an online school helping students

prepare for the TOEFL exam.

He talks about TOEFL, IBT and TOEFL Essentials.

If you want to find out more about the TOEFL exams,

you can go to ets.org and find out more.

If you want to know more about IELTS,

you can go to ielts.org.

We'll be talking about general listening skills for English

but also exam preparation.

Josh is American, he's from New York

so he has a different accent from me

and he lives out in Japan with his wife and children.

So as well as giving you some interesting insights

to listening skills,

we break up the conversation a little bit

with some banter about being married to a a person

of a different nationality

and how we bring up our children

in those kinds of situations.

All very interesting stuff.

So let's jump straight in, find out more about Josh

and help you level up your listing skills.

Great.

So I'm here with Josh.

Great, Josh nice to see you.

- Nice to see you, Keith.

Thank you for having me.

- How are you doing today?

- I am okay, I'm hot

cause I'm in a hot room in Japan right now.

There's not a lot of air conditioning here.

- That's right, you're living out in Japan,

which parts of Japan are you in?

- I'm in Kyoto right now,

which is kind of a traditional kind of city

in the suburbs of Kyoto.

- Right.

Great, so Josh today, I mean we're gonna be talking about

listening skills in English

and in the TOEFL exam and the IELTS exam.

Now your organisation is TST Prep.

I mean, tell us a little bit about you,

your background and that organisation.

- Sure.

So about me is, I went to school to get a degree

in ESL TESL, to teach English as a second language,

got my master's in the States, travelled abroad.

I worked in Japan and Korea, that kind of thing,

worked at a school in New York called ASA College

for the intensive English programme there

and I was the academic coordinator.

And while I was there, there was a TOEFL class

and the TOEFL class, so to get a student visa in the States,

you have to be or to maintain your student visa,

you have to be sitting in a room for 20 hours

learning English or learning something.

So you have to be 20 hours a week in a room studying.

And so some students want to take the TOEFL

so they can go into other schools and universities.

And so I was teaching TOEFL 20 hours a week,

there was a class, there was TOEFL every day

four hours a day.

- Wow, that's why you're a expert.

- Yeah, that's kinda how I learned so much about it.

And so that's kind of what led me

to doing more on YouTube and start the TST Prep.

And then we built up a couple of courses

where we started with helping students

with their TOEFL speaking actually.

So we would help them improve.

So that was the big thing

that has made us different is that we really focus

on trying to improve students' scores

instead of just preparing them for the test

actually improving their strategy

and also their English ability in general.

And so that's kind of how we got started

and that's where we're at now.

- Great, we'll talk more.

So our focus today, we're gonna look

at building up listening skills

and ideas for students on the,

to develop their listening skills.

I mean, I think when it comes to exam prep,

general listing skills, as well as particular ideas

and tips for the exam,

maybe talking first of all

about kind of general listening skills.

So with your students,

what do you say to them

about developing their listening skills?

- So yeah, so there's a difference

between improving your listening skills

for a test and then listening skills in general

and to make that distinction.

So a lot of times, but one good thing about a test

is that it kind of lets you know where you're at,

like how far away you are from what you want,

your score and your ability.

So if you're, pretty far away from your score

it means you have to, like you said

improve your general listening skills.

And you there's one distinction that I make with students.

I guess there's so many things to say

I'm trying to think where to start,

but there's extensive and there's intensive practise.

And I think that that's one important thing

to think about is that the extensive is

kind of watching things that you enjoy, that you like,

you're surrounded by English

that you're watching movies, reading books.

If you want to read a book, you want to do that,

but something like that.

and you're doing things to this for the enjoyment of it.

And you're kind of getting a lot of input

and hopefully enjoyable input that is mostly comprehensible.

Most research agrees that you should understand

like over 90% of what the content you're consuming

to get the most benefit out of it.

A lot of students think like,

if I understand about 70% of the texts that's okay,

that's actually kind of hurting you more

than it's helping,

because it's really hard to understand

if you only understand seven out of 10 words

in a sentence, it'd be very, very difficult.

So that's one thing that I would usually talk

to students about just kind of some things

that they think are helpful

that might be a misconception

and a big one is trying

to do something that's too difficult.

- Right.

So that's, yeah.

That's interesting comprehensible input.

That's the Krashen, theory, right? Around

having to comprehend that kind of level plus one idea.

So you basically, if students are finding

they're listening to something and it's really so difficult

they're not getting like even 50%,

it's maybe better to actually not to be listening to that

to find other sources.

- I mean, if you enjoy it and it's engaging great,

like that's the most important thing.

I mean, if you don't understand most of it

but you love watching the show, Friends,

let's say or something, then keep doing it

because at least you're engaged

and you're thinking about it.

And so that is the best type of extensive input.

- Right.

- Because you understand most of it,

there's a couple of things you hear.

You're like, oh, I wonder what that is

or I'm not sure what that means or I think I remember that.

And then the intensive stuff is a bit different.

The intensive stuff might be a little bit more painful

I'd say.

Actual TOEFL practise or

that kind of thing.

So I would balance it between the two of

doing something that you enjoy, that's pretty easy,

you understand most of it

and the intensive stuff doesn't have

to be difficult necessarily,

but it won't be like just watching

your favourite Netflix show.

- Right.

- It might be, like a Ted Talk or something like that.

- Yep, yep, fantastic.

So a quick question on the extensive

because sometimes I have my own ideas,

but as students ask,

should I be watching a film with subtitles

or without subtitles, subtitles in my own language

or subtitles in English, what's our take on subtitles?

- Never in your own language.

Never ever because then you're just gonna get lazy

and you're just not gonna do the work

of trying to figure out what's going on.

The only time I would say that it's recommended

is if like you're tired and you don't want to deal with it

but you still want extensive practise.

But for the most part, with subtitles is fine.

I don't really have,

unless you really want to focus on your listening.

You could do a kind of practise where

you listen without subtitles and then you play it back

and you try to see if you were correct or not

with the subtitles.

- Yeah.

- So usually when, like when I study Japanese, for example

I watch a show and I make flashcards

with the sentences that I want to study.

Like, so there's apps.

Like there's a tool on a Google Chrome called

there's a Chrome extension called

Language Learning with Netflix.

And you can just install that extension

and you can make flashcards

from TV shows that you're watching.

They have language learning with YouTube.

It's the same exact thing.

So for me, having really fun engaging content

is like the best thing.

And there's so much out there that you don't really

need to have like a special book,

English book for that.

You can find content on Netflix or YouTube or whatever

and now there's tools where you can actually make flashcards

and do that kind of thing.

So my biggest piece of advice would be to,

try to watch something and have a tool

where you can make some flashcards

that you can review something about it later.

- That's fantastic, I like that.

I mean, going back to my learning days of Spanish,

I did the old fashioned, but it was the same thing

so I used to listen to series or TV films,

and then write down words as I heard them.

And also they were words that I had just studied

or seen somewhere else that seemed relevant

or important for me.

And I used to go back and listen again

and write down like the collocations or what was the word

in which words were going together with it.

And then ending up reviewing those,

this now I'm showing my age,

but this was before the days of flashcards, Anki

and stuff like that.

So I just used to write them down and review them.

But basically now,

as you said, the language learning Chrome plugin.

It's great.

It makes it so convenient to do to review stuff

and to learn language.

- Yeah, I mean, so for me, I'm studying Japanese

kind of like an hour or two every day for the past,

I've had time to study finally

but so for the past eight months or so,

and like with no, no,

no, no, no, no.

If you're thinking about what you're doing,

if you're thinking about the sentences

writing them down, reviewing them,

that's the best thing, you're thinking about it.

And that's the most important is

that you're just kind of thinking and trying.

That's one thing that I noticed about using the Anki stuff

and the flashcard decks that I think is a little bit

of a hindrance, is that I'm kind of relying

on the technology to tell me what to do

instead of me kind of thinking about what I should be doing.

So, and I think that that's the major benefit

of what you were doing before with Spanish.

- That's interesting.

That's interesting.

- How's your Spanish by the way?

- No esta mal, no esta mal ('not bad' - Spanish).

- So I guess it's kind of,

it depends on the student of course,

but like when a student says

like they're pretty far away from there IELTS score,

so then maybe test prep is not

the most practical thing right now.

How how should they go about improving their listening

would you say?

- So I think one of the first things

I would say to students is to create a listening habit.

It's kind of what you said

with your Japanese two hours a day

is just create a time

for me, the same time every day same place,

where I'm gonna spend 20 minutes

doing the listing activity and having that habit

so you're doing it regularly to develop that skill.

If you've identified that as a skill

you need to develop and focus on.

And then I guess having both, so you talked

about extensive listing and intensive listening.

I think a similar thing as in listening

to shorter texts and also to longer texts,

because I like to do listening

where I kind of take a minute of something

and I just analyse that minute.

So I listen to it five times, really,

maybe writing down a word, getting the gist,

repeating some of the phrases

and I just really analyse that for a minute.

And that might be my 20 minutes study.

And another day my 20 minutes study might be

I listen to a 20 minute podcast

and I've got that extensive listening practise

because the thing is with IELTS

is you have to be able to focus.

I mean, it's a 30 minute test, right?

There's no mercy.

I mean, you're there for 30 minutes.

It's question after question.

You've got to be so focused on being able to listen.

But if you only ever listen to

your speaking partner or your classmate

and you don't spend like 30 minutes listening

to extended pieces of texts, you're not gonna make it.

So that balance short text and long text of listening

I think is pretty important.

And out of curiosity then is the TOEFL,

are the listenings all American accents?

Or do you have like different country accents?

- So the TOEFL IBT, which is the traditional TOEFL tests

that everybody knows and, according to ETS, loves

is pretty straightforward.

It's mostly American, North American accents.

Once in a while, they would have a British accent

but it was pretty rare.

I haven't heard one in a while

but they have this new test that's TOEFL Essential tests.

And that has accents from all over, some even AI

speech to text or no text to speech.

So they have some of those as well,

Australian, South African, British.

So they have all these different accents

and they're kind of labelling it as a,

international test or whatever you want to call it.

So, yeah, the IBT is usually just American accents

but how about the IELTS, is IELTS all over?

Or is that just?

- It's over.

It's a common misunderstanding, right?

The IELTS is a British test

and therefore it's all British English.

It's not at all.

It's very much an international test.

And so they deliberately have,

mainly your different standard Englishes.

So you'll get some Australian, Indonesia,

and American, British, Irish, Scottish accent,

all different accents.

Which I think was important for listening

because again, some people may just tend to listen

to the BBC or the voice of America

and they get focused on that one accent.

And for IELTS, you've got to listen to everything.

You've got to tune into Australian, to South African,

radios, whatever it is.

You need a wide range, a wide range of accents.

- And yeah, I mean, especially nowadays

you have to be able to communicate,

not just a country that the first language is English

but people who are both speaking English

as their second language, that's what we're gonna do.

Most of your communicating actually in my experience

a lot of people.

- Totally.

- Yeah, it's crucial.

- I think it's invaluable also, just generally speaking

to be listening to even, well, not non-standard accents

but accents from other countries, right?

The Japanese speaking English,

the Chinese speaking English,

the Indians speaking English

because as you said, 90% of English communication

is between people who are using it as a second language.

So with that, it's important to be open to that

and to be used to that as well.

- What's really interesting is that I sometimes recommend

for students who want to practise speaking

voice typing on Google docs,

so if they use Google docs,

they can do voice typing and they can speak

and they can see if the Google docs

is recognising what they're saying

but they have different English accents.

And it's not just what you would imagine

like UK and South African and Australia

but it's also like Nigerian English

and Thai English and Vietnamese English.

So they have these software that recognises

the patterns that a lot of speakers from different areas

of the world and how they speak English.

It's very interesting.

- That is interesting.

I'm gonna try that.

I haven't tried that yet.

- Yeah, yeah.

Voice typing.

Yeah, it's a nice little,

especially for students who don't have a teacher

to work with it, it's a nice thing to practise shadowing

or something like that.

- Brilliant.

- Nice, how did you end up there?

- Wow, that's a long story.

A short version is I lived in Spain in my 20s,

I've spent about 10 years here as a teacher and trainer,

then I moved to Asia and then I decided

with my wife and family to come back to Spain

about three years ago because we love the country

and it's a great place to live.

- Really nice.

So you're yeah, your wife is British as well?

- No, my wife is Chinese.

- Wow, okay.

And our daughter was born in Beijing

but she's a British national and we all speak Spanish.

It's a bit of a strange family.

- That's interesting.

Yeah, my wife's Japanese.

The kids were born in the States in America, in New York

but now we live in Japan.

And so the kids are confused a little bit.

I guess it's kind of a similar situation for you as well.

- It is.

- This is something that I didn't know

before we had kids and stuff,

and this is a couple arguments

that I'm American.

So I'm used to kids being in a separate room,

even when they're a baby

which my wife thought was ridiculous.

And so that's one of the many sacrifices.

- I'm with you, I'm with you

because the cultural differences around

bringing up children are huge in China and England,

I think, yeah.

Maybe it's an Asian Western thing as well.

Yeah, we've had our fair share of arguments.

I'll say about that.

- Yeah, yeah.

Sure, sure.

- Hi guys, how are you doing?

Are you enjoying the video?

How are your listening skills coming on?

Can you understand everything?

Maybe not everything.

I know sometimes we get quite fast, right?

But do remember on YouTube just below this video

you can turn on the closed captions,

look for the CC symbol

and that will give you subtitles in English

which can help you with your understanding if you need it.

Do remember on YouTube to press the subscribe button

turn on notifications, if you're enjoying this video

and also do check out my new channel,

English Speaking Success Shorts.

Very short videos to help you

improve your English speaking skills

in a very very short time.

Go and check it out, the link's down below.

Right now, let's get back to this conversation with Josh.

Let's talk a bit more about the two exams

the TOEFL and the IELTS exams

and the intensive listening practise and preparation.

I mean, IELTS has what kind of four sections

and it's kind of for listening,

you basically get to listen

to general English and academic English.

You get to listen to one speaker giving a monologue

and conversation speakers, for general and academic.

What's it like in TOEFL?

- Can I ask you a question about IELTS?

So that there's two tests, is that both tests the same?

The listening, the general and the academic,

so the listening section is the same for both?

- Exactly, general and academic listening

is exactly the same, as is the speaking.

So the speaking and listening tests are the same

for academic modules and general modules.

- Okay, I see.

So with the listening it's, so for the IBT,

I'll talk about the IBT.

The Essentials is new, so it's kind of,

it's throwing me a curve ball lately.

I mean, it's different for the Essentials test,

but for the IBT, the traditional one

is five listening passages.

They're separated into two parts.

It's a one conversation, two lectures,

one conversation one lecture.

You don't see the questions until after the listening.

So it's important to take notes and to

kind of be very focused while you're listening.

And the, yeah.

And so the conversations all take place on campus.

So it's all something to do with like university life.

Conversations are usually between a student and a professor

or a student and campus worker.

They're about three or four minutes

followed by five questions.

The academic talks are about five minutes

or a range of academic topics.

And they're followed by six questions

and what makes it so hard is that five minutes,

I say very quickly and simply,

but it's a long time to sit and listen to somebody

and to focus.

And then to remember all that information

and try to use it to answer the questions, is tough.

So it's a tough test, tough listening.

- That's very interesting

cause that's a different approach from IELTS

because IELTS basically,

you get to read the questions first.

And one of the key strategies

is to read the questions first carefully

and be guessing what the answers could be, right?

I mean, when you read the questions at the beginning,

first, it gives you the context.

So you can activate your schemata.

You can be thinking about,

if the topic is global warming what's the language,

what are the the things you know about it,

but as you're reading it and you look at the gaps and go,

this is probably a verb.

This is probably a noun or this is a number

and you're getting ready to listen.

That's a key skill.

For TOEFL then that's not applicable.

So for your kind of listening,

what's the strategy?

- Well, so I guess, what you're doing is,

I forget the terminology for right now,

but like kind of prepping,

that like before you listen, kind of thinking about,

what are the questions and what does that mean,

taking guesses about what you think

that the listening will be about based on the questions,

that kind of strategy.

We do encourage them to do a similar thing.

Just kind of understanding the structure

of the listening passages.

So they know that they should be looking for something.

So for example, they're gonna know

that one question after the conversation will be

what was this about, what were they talking about?

And so you want to listen for that.

You want to listen that the student

will probably have a problem and the campus worker

is gonna offer some solutions to that problem.

So you want to listen for those things.

So by becoming more familiar with the test structure,

you can kind of organise your notes a little bit better

and also organise your thinking beforehand

of what you want to find.

And same thing with the lectures.

You want to figure out what's the main idea.

What is the professor hoping the students learn

by the end of this?

How does the professor illustrate this topic

with probably two examples

and try not to focus too much about,

they shouldn't ask like a very detailed question,

like, what year was this invented?

It shouldn't be that specific, but it's kind of like

why does the professor say this?

Or, what is implied about this?

So it's more kind of getting the gist of

of what you're listening to and the structure.

- That's interesting.

So it's listening for gist is really important for that.

- Yeah.

Yeah, both general and specific.

Yeah, so general in the sense

of like the gist of the whole passage

and more specific, like, kind of

why does the professor organise the lecture this way

or, what were the questions like here?

- It reminds me actually

of a technique I was taught as a teacher,

somebody taught me to do it was

when listening to a passage to,

as you're listening to the passage to try

and write the answer to the five W questions

like who, when, what, where?

- I see, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

- So as you're listening you find out who is it?

It's John.

What's happening, where are they?

And that kind of practise activity.

And that was the general listening skills.

But actually it sounds like that would be

the kind of thing might help in TOEFL listening.

- Yeah, I think it would.

Sometimes with strategy,

students get so caught up in the strategy

that they forget they're supposed to listen.

- Right.

- So like sometimes with advice

like find who, what, where, when, why, like

they're trying to find who and where and why

and they forget they're supposed to understand

what they're listening.

I've heard a lot of advice

that tends to get into a kind of minefield

where people take it a bit too literally

and then forget that they're supposed to just

understand what they're listening to.

- Right.

- And the biggest challenge of that

is taking notes and listening at the same time.

So that's a skill that is hard to do.

I don't know, in IELTS today,

do they have to take notes?

When they listen, are they allowed to take notes?

Is that a skill that you have to teach them?

- You're allowed to take notes,

but rather than taking notes on the listening

because you already see the question

you would be filling in.

- You would just answer them.

- So you're hearing,

there's a sentence with a word missing.

The thing is the word missing is probably,

may not be the same word in the listening

because it's probably a synonym or a paraphrase.

- Right.

- And you've got to get the general idea

and then write down a word that fits.

I think an example IELTS

is to look at the instructions

because they have these instructions that say,

add one word or use maximum two words,

or put in a word and a number.

And you really look at the instructions

and then when you're making your notes

or filling in the gaps,

make sure you get it right

according to the instructions, yeah.

- Okay, so for us, first the instructions

are always the same in TOEFL.

So we actually say don't bother with the instructions.

Don't even read them.

They're always the same.

Yeah.

- So with, I mean, with TOEFL,

if you're doing kind of a listening class

with TOEFL students, what advice are you giving them?

What strategies are you giving them?

- When they come to class,

usually it's very much like a workshop

and we assign homework to students.

That's a mix of

these kinds of short activities that we make in-house,

which is like to, for example,

one activity is transcription.

They have to try to transcribe a 20 second passage.

That's an academic passage,

so they can listen to that as many times as they want

but they should try to transcribe it.

And that is just kind of building listening skills

in general and also getting used to patterns

and the way people speak.

Maybe you don't notice when people,

when some speakers bring words together

that kind of thing, drop sounds.

So we do that type of practise.

We also do finding the main idea

of a short passage, about 30 seconds or less.

And so we go through those types of activities as well.

So very practical test prep kind of stuff.

- Yeah, I mean, I had somebody, I was reading the other day

about a tip, a listening tip, which was a good tip.

So he talked about noticing the structure

or what we call the discourse markers.

Like the things that connect the sentences.

Like, first of all, I'm gonna talk about this,

after that, finally, and noticing the discourse markers

to help you structure and understand the structure.

It's a great tip, but in a way,

the tip on its own is not enough

because unless you practise that like 10 times

on 10 different things, it's gonna be no use for you.

So now I think, yes, the tips are good

but it's putting them into practise,

10 times,

10,000 times.

Have you heard of the 10,000 hours, right?

That kind of idea.

- The mastery.

- The mastery.

Not that those students need 10,000 hours of English

but to master anything yes,

you need to put in time, time and practise I think.

- Like you said, I think the one thing

that you harp on a lot which I think is great

is that you really want to enjoy it.

I think one good thing about a test is that

it really is a good measurement of your skill,

but yeah, the prep part of it,

can be not so much fun.

And so you want to try to balance that,

like you say about kind of enjoying what you're doing

enjoying the process is so important

because if you're gonna be centred

spending a couple hours doing something every day

and you're miserable doing it,

you're not gonna want to do it.

What do you recommend for students to kind of,

we touched on it a little bit,

but what do you recommend for students

who want to like, enjoy studying the IELTS?

What are some things that

that you would recommend for them for listening?

- It's a very good question.

Again I think when it comes to general listening,

you need a balance between things you enjoy.

So your favourite Netflix series,

but also things that will probably come up.

I mean, so you need to be able to understand

the wide range of topics, right?

People talking about climate change or science or history.

So trying to get a balance between what you like

and things that maybe interest you less,

but you need to listen to them.

But finding, I mean there are websites,

I think which are great.

I mean, I dunno, there's the ELLO website

which is a library,

a listening library,

it has a wealth of stuff

and it's really good because it has all sorts of stuff.

It's very natural English.

It's not scripted.

And that's the other problem with films, right,

films are scripted.

So they're not really in natural English.

So you want to be careful on not just watching films.

But looking for stuff that is entertaining.

And I guess when you're learning and practising

to try and take control of your learning

so that you're doing it in a way that you enjoy.

So for example, you really enjoy flashcards

and you like working with flashcards

and you like designing them and writing them,

then use flash cards.

But if that doesn't work for you, don't do it.

If you're more into word lists, so the traditional

write 20 words in a list, and you write them

and if that works for you, then do it.

So try and find out what works for you

and what you enjoy doing.

It's so important because it goes,

I think it's Stephen Krashen again, "The affective filter"

the affective filter,

that the idea that if you're stressed,

your learning goes down

and if you're relaxed, your learning ability goes up

and it's as simple as that.

And so it's just, it's finding

a way of controlling your learning

and doing it in a way that you like.

- Yeah.

And I think that that's another thing too,

is with listening, and I think you mentioned this

in a video of yours before,

this obsession with being correct,

try to be careful with that.

It can go overboard and like

if you care too much about being correct all the time,

like, so for example,

if you're doing TOEFL listening or IELTS listening,

and you hear a word that you don't know

and then you're thinking like, what was that word?

I know that word was that,

oh, now you're not listening

to what to what's going on.

Now you're thinking about that word.

So, you kind of have to be comfortable with

not knowing everything that's going on

when you're listening to another language, which is tough.

It's hard to do.

- It is tough and it's funny.

And it comes from school, right?

I mean, my daughter learns French at school

and I speak French.

And now and again, I speak to her in French

and she says, oh you can't say that daddy,

we've not studied that yet.

And I'm like, but in real life,

it's not just what you study, it's being exposed

and being comfortable, not knowing everything.

So, yeah, I think that is important actually

that you're not obsessing.

When you're listening,

don't be always looking up every word

because that's not a listening skill

that's vocabulary learning.

So know why you're listening.

If you're listening to learn vocabulary, great.

Look up word.

If you're listening to develop your skills of listening,

don't look up every word.

It's a different, yeah.

Great, well Josh,

I think we're gonna start winding up.

For students to find out more

about you and about TOEFL,

maybe where should they go?

- Sure.

So well, our site tstprep.com.

On the site there's free sample tests

that you can check out the TOEFL IBT

and we're making TOEFL Essential stuff now as well.

And you can also check the site.

We're gonna start doing Duolingo

in a couple of months and yeah.

And hopefully people enjoy it and find it helpful.

And yeah, so tstprep.com and also our YouTube channel.

I'm there talking to a screen.

- Brilliant.

Go and check all of those.

That sounds fantastic.

Josh it has been a pleasure talking to you.

Thank you very much for coming along

and sharing your thoughts on listening skills.

- Thank you, Keith.

Thank you for having me, I appreciate it.

- Take care all the best.

- Okay, bye-bye

- There we are.

I hope you enjoyed this video.

If you found this video useful,

then you should watch this video

with another teacher Datio from Vietnam

and we're having a conversation about IELTS speaking.

That's it.

Thank you very much for watching.

And I look forward to seeing you in a few moments

in the next video.

Take care now.

Bye bye.

Oh dear, oh dear.

Is it TEFL, Tafel, Toffel, tofu.

Oh dear, it's not TEFL, right?

Because that's a teacher's qualification, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And it's not tofu because that's a kind of food.

Dear, oh dear.

It must be TOEFL, right?

Gosh, I hope so.

Anyway, there's only a few thousand people watching.

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