Shadowing practice: This Is Why You NEED to visit Australia!

This is english listening practice on unscripted narration, not on written lines read aloud. Stephen from Flying The Nest talks straight into the camera in an Australian accent, at 177 words per minute, which is faster than 41 percent of the catalogue here. Quick, but the sentences are short and the vocabulary is everyday, so the recording sits at B1.

The opening is a morning in a backyard with kangaroos in it, including a joey he tries to zoom in on. Then the weather turns and a planned helicopter ride is in doubt. He meets the pilot, flies 45 minutes out, lands in the bush and walks to some of the oldest Aboriginal rock art, and a guide shows him a tree with sweet nectar in it. Across 230 lines you get one voice doing most of the talking, plus short exchanges with the people he meets, so both halves of everyday english are covered: narrating what you see, and greeting a stranger.

For a learner the useful part is that nothing here is performed. He restarts sentences, reacts to things while filming, and the rhythm keeps changing with what is in front of him.

Work on how to pronounce english words the way this speaker does, by taking small pieces rather than whole minutes. Three lines carry most of what is interesting in the opening.

• "Good morning everybody, Stephen here, welcome back to Cairns." Four chunks in one breath. Notice that Cairns is one syllable in his mouth, and that "everybody" loses its middle vowel and comes out closer to three beats than four.
• "we're gonna do a bit of" This recording contains gonna six times, and this is the clearest of them. The whole phrase runs together at one speed: the "of" is barely there, and "a bit of" lands as a single unstressed run before the stressed word that follows. Repeat it until it is one movement, not five words.
• "I wasn't expecting our day to turn out like this." A flat, dry delivery with the pitch falling on "this". The "to" is reduced to almost nothing. Copying that fall matters more than the vowels.

Shadow this line before anything else, five times, without the video: "Good morning everybody, Stephen here, welcome back to Cairns." It is short, spoken straight to camera, and it hands you his rhythm fast. Then move outward in this order.

• Play "This has been our morning every day this week, waking up to these guys." and match the breath, not the words. It is one exhale in the original. If you run out of air, you are placing stress on too many syllables.
• Take the question "I don't know, do helicopters take off in this rain?" and record yourself. The pitch rises only at the end. Most learners lift the whole second half, which sounds anxious rather than curious.
• Do "we're gonna do a bit of" at half speed, then at his speed. Do not slow it down and keep it slow: the reduction only exists at full pace.
• Add the meeting: "Nice to meet you, I'm Jess." and the reply on the next line. Short social lines are the ones you will actually reuse.
• Finish by running the backyard section end to end, then the helicopter section. Score each line, keep the two lowest, and start tomorrow's english speaking practice with those.