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理工系大学院生のための学術英語

Academic Listening

Academic Listening #2: The Five Signposts

中級 / Intermediate2 分

Academic Listening · Part 2 of 7

Five kinds of phrase tell you what the speaker is about to do. Learn them and you can predict.

Signposts do five jobs. Once you can name the job, you can predict the sentence that follows — and prediction is what makes fast speech understandable.

Tap 🔊 to hear a phrase spoken by a recorded voice. Say it aloud three times yourself: a phrase your mouth can produce is a phrase your ear can catch at speed.

1 Orientation

Opens the talk and lists what is coming. Write the list down.

  • Today I want to cover three things.
  • Let me begin by outlining the structure of this talk.
  • I’ll come back to that at the end.

2 Sequence

Closes one section, opens the next. Start a new block of notes.

  • That brings me to my second point.
  • Having looked at the theory, let’s turn to the data.
  • So much for the background. Now, the experiment itself.

3 Emphasis

Marks the sentence that matters. Star it.

  • The key point here is that the reaction is reversible.
  • If you remember one thing from today, remember this.
  • I want to stress that these results are preliminary.

4 Contrast

The next idea reverses the last. Draw an arrow bending back.

  • However, that is not what we observed.
  • What we actually found was rather different.
  • In contrast to the earlier model, ours predicts a shift.

5 Summary

The argument, compressed. Stop writing and listen.

  • So, to sum up, there are three mechanisms at work.
  • The take-home message is simple.
  • Let me recap before I take questions.
Notice that none of these phrases contains technical content. They are ordinary, unstressed words spoken quickly — which is exactly why learners miss them. Train your ear on the function words, not only on the terminology.
Next · Part 3 of 7Take Notes on the ShapeStop writing sentences. Let the page show the structure of the talk instead.← Part 1: Why a Lecture Is Harder Than a Conversation

Academic Listening series, Shimane University. Spoken examples are recordings stored on this site.

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