These listening materials are designed to help you become better acquainted with a variety of typical student questions, common idioms used within them, and fast, reduced speech, a manner of speaking often used by American students. Most of the questions in these materials are generic questions; they could be heard in nearly any class or lab.

Start the Common Questions Listening Exercise

Directions

Choose a category of questions such as "office hours" or "student work."

You will be presented with two buttons: QUESTION and ANSWER. Press the question button to hear the first question. Repeat aloud the question and compose an appropriate response.

When you play the answer button, you will see the text for both the question and answer as well as hear an answer. To proceed further in the category, click the NEXT button. To return to the opening menu of categories, click the MENU button.

Remember, there are many different appropriate ways to answer any given question. These responses are provided in order to help you better understand the questions and to give you some good examples, culturally and linguistically, that you may use as models.

These materials were developed for the Center for Teaching and Learning Services by former ITA Program instructor Bronwen Benson Lu. Thanks to Caroline Rosen, Adam Carpenter, Tiffany Haag, Whitney Goodrich, and Eric Schell for lending their voices and linguistic talents to the audio taping. The interface was developed by Paul Baepler and Colleen Meyers at the Center for Teaching and Learning Services with help from Kurtis Scaletta and Scott Wilson-Barnard from the Digital Media Center. The earlier version using Real audio was created by Ron Fitch.