Listening - Stories & Narratives
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Pre-Intermediate
A police inspector comes and speaks to the wife of a murder victim.
Past simple to talk about sequence of past events
Three people talk about and describe old photos.
Reminiscing, story telling, past simple
Practice Real English Conversations
- Listen to natural spoken English and choose how to respond
- Build vocabulary with key phrases and definitions
- Replay audio at slow speed to catch every word
- Review the full transcript when you've finished
Intermediate
Carolina talks about the great love story in her life.
Subject/object questions, past simple describing narrative
A woman talks about her father's life.
Used To & Would to talk about past habits
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Advanced
Listen to the exciting story of survival at sea, against all the odds.
Sailor describes a terrifying survival ordeal in the Pacific Ocean
Two teachers talk about the scandalous theft of cake at their school.
Past modals of deduction
A scary short story about pirates, shipwrecks and strange ships!
Short story telling, narrative tenses, advanced vocabulary
Two true-crime podcast hosts examine the 1997 disappearance of a small-town librarian whose car was found twenty miles in the wrong direction.
Speculation and deduction; narrative sequencing in investigations
A retired harbourmaster discovers that his forty-one years of ship logs include vessels that officially never existed, some of which match ships that sank decades earlier.
Nautical vocabulary; unreliable narration and ambiguity
A used bookshop owner in Ontario finds handwritten notes in the margins of old books that describe events in her life before they happen.
Literary and bookshop vocabulary; describing unexplained events
An antique map dealer in Vermont discovers a detailed 1893 survey of a town that has no trace in any historical record, until strangers begin contacting him to say they grew up there.
Cartography and historical vocabulary; building an unsolved mystery
An overnight radio engineer discovers a voice hidden in the dead air between programmes, reading news stories that haven't happened yet.
Technical broadcasting vocabulary; describing anomalous events
A retired mail carrier begins receiving letters postmarked from dates that haven't arrived, written in handwriting she recognises as her dead husband's.
Postal and domestic vocabulary; grief and the uncanny
