Shadowing practice: How to Master British Small Talk

This clip is Teacher Tom walking through the unwritten rules of British small talk, and it is a good pick for english speaking practice because he talks fast. At 228 words per minute the clip is faster than 84% of the catalogue, so your mouth has to keep up with a real British pace, not a slowed down teaching voice.

The level is B1, so the sentences are not simple, but they are not academic either. He opens with a scene everyone recognises, two people stuck in a lift, then moves into the actual mechanics of greetings and weather talk. It is a lecture, one voice explaining a social rule, which makes it useful english listening practice as well as speaking practice: you hear the reasoning before you repeat the lines.

Three moments in this clip are worth slowing down for before you shadow this line for pronunciation, not just meaning.

• "Have you ever stood next to a British person in a lift?" opens the whole clip with a rising question, then "Both of you staring at the floor, the only sound is someone awkwardly clearing their throat." lands flat and slow. Say the second sentence out loud and copy the drop in energy on "awkwardly clearing their throat", that contrast is the joke.
• The greetings block is the densest bit of language in the clip: "You all right?", "How's it going?", "Hey, how you doing?", "How ya?", "How do?". Five ways to say the same thing, each clipped shorter than the last. This is the line to use for british english pronunciation practice, since the vowels and stress shift with each variant even though the meaning does not.
• "As Kate Fox noted in her book, Watching the English, English weather speak is a form of code." is a longer, more formal sentence dropped into an otherwise casual talk. Reading it at speed, in one breath, is a fair test of whether you can pronounce english words in a British accent without slowing down for the harder ones like meteorological or inhibitions later in the video.

Do not try the whole 161 lines in one pass at 228 words per minute. Work outward from the greetings block, since it is the shortest, densest, most repeatable stretch in the clip.

• Start with lines 1 and 2, the lift scene. Shadow the pause between the question and the punchline, that timing carries as much meaning as the words.
• Move to "You all right?" through "How do?". Say each one, stop, say it again, and try to make the five variants sound as different from each other as Teacher Tom makes them sound.
• Take "Yeah, all good, you?" on its own. It is the reply half of the exchange, so pair it with one of the greetings above and shadow both sides of a two line conversation.
• Finish on the weather sentence, "English weather speak is a form of code." It is the longest line in this stretch, so once you can say it fluently at full speed, the rest of the clip's shorter lines will feel easy by comparison.
• Only then go back and watch the section again with subtitles on, checking the words you guessed at against what he actually says.