Intensive English Listening Sarah's Morning sentence one

September 23, 2025 Episode 456

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Hi, welcome to English Listening world.

I'm Les and I have over 20 years experience teaching English conversation to students in my own classroom.

Today I'd like to spend some time working on intensive listening with you.

OK, we're gonna start with the story.

It has about 12 sentences in it.

Today we'll focus on one sentence because this is intensive listening.

Let me say this sentence 3 times, so you can listen.

Then we'll go into the deeper side of the listening practice.

One, Sarah wakes up early.

Sarah wakes up early.

Now, you've heard it 3 times.

At regular speed, let's think about the rhythm.

English has strong and weak beats.

Strong followed by weak, followed by strong.

Yeah Every time I clap, that's a strong.

Let's say this sentence again with clapping.

Sarah wakes up early.

OK, now.

Each of those strong words should be easier to hear.

The weak beats should be a little bit more difficult.

The strong one, sad.

Sarah wakes up early.

The second is wait.

Sarah wakes up early.

Then the third one is er.

They're not the complete word every time, but they should give us a hint of what the word is.

Now, let's take a look at two words that go together to form a liaison, wakes up.

In normal conversation, we don't say it like wakes up.

It joins together.

The S joins wake and up, wakes up.

So it sounds like one word.

There's a second liaison, that is up and early.

Up early.

We don't see it with a pause.

They go together, a pyramid.

The pea kind of moves over to the early.

Some of my students say it sounds like pearly.

But there is no pearly, it's up early.

Now, there's also a consonant cluster.

That's where we have consonants together.

Many languages don't do this, but English does this.

You get the wakes.

There's a sound and a sound.

And they go together.

Aches, wakes, wakes, wakes up, wakes up early.

So don't put a sound between the and the sup.

Wake up, no, wakes, OK? Now let's do a bit of shadowing.

Shattering is when I say the sentence.

And you say the sentence at the same time as me.

The first time is really, really difficult, but we're going to repeat it.

And it should get easier with practice.

I'm gonna say it 3 times.

Sarah wakes up early.

Now, ideally 3 times isn't ideal, you should do it about 20 times.

Intensive listening practice is just that really intensive work, but it's a very short sentence.

Doing it 20 times in a row should be really easy.

It should take less than a minute.

I'm gonna put this sentence on the English listening world site, so you can go there and practice shadowing.

You should practice shadowing the sentence 20 times a day, until you can do it automatically.

That's the best way to practice intensive listening.

We will move to new sentences before too long, but for this week, we'll work on this sentence.

Thanks for coming and good luck with your homework shadowing 20 times.