Spoken English Material

[Elisabet Schwartzkopf]

Speechifyhas created quality content for improving online English speaking skills of learners. This includes English Grammar lessons and special Spoken English lessons. Download your free lessons today!

At Speechify, we believe that fluency in English is only possible with consistent practice. To ensure a meaningful learning experience, we bring you free study assignments. These assignments have been carefully assembled to ensure an all-round learning experience for each of our students.

Most of the contents in the resources section have been requested by our students over the years and every few months we have newer additions! This continuous feedback along with our eminent online English tutors has helped us put together the best resources for you!

Speechify provides free study material for everyone. You can choose your own lessons based on your level and interest, or as per your teacher's suggestion. We have lessons for Spoken English, English Grammar and English Writing improvement. Our reading material focuses on teaching new words and correct usage of English Grammar.

Each role-play is designed to elicit an assessable sample of speech which reflects your speaking ability in a health profession context. It is usual for a role-play to come to a natural end at around the 5-minute mark. If this does not happen, the Interlocutor will signal clearly that it is time to conclude the role-play.

There is no penalty for not completing all the elements on the role card. However, the more elements of the role-play you cover, the more evidence you are likely to give of your ability to communicate in spoken English. Use the preparation time to think about which elements of the role-play might require you to explain something in more detail or to ask the patient for more clarification.

These situations may include elements of tension which are a normal part of the real-life context. You may experience anxious or angry patients, patients who misunderstand their situation and limited time in which to explain instructions.

You should aim to achieve the highest level in the descriptors for each criteria. Test-takers securing grade B will have achieved predominantly scores of 5 out of 6 on each linguistic criteria and 2 out of 3 for the clinical communication criteria.

A spoken word album is a recording of spoken material, a predecessor of the contemporary audiobook genre. Rather than featuring music or songs, the content of spoken word albums include political speeches, dramatic readings of historical documents, dialogue from a film soundtrack, dramatized versions of literary classics, stories for children, comedic material, and instructional recordings.[1] The Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album has been awarded annually since 1959.

Spoken word albums have been made since the early days of recording; examples include the popular Ronald Colman 1941 version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol on American Decca Records. However, a true milestone was reached when Columbia Masterworks, which had previously released an album of excerpts from Shakespeare's Richard II with Maurice Evans, made a complete recording of Margaret Webster's famed (and never filmed) 1943 Broadway production of Othello, starring Paul Robeson, Jos Ferrer, and Uta Hagen, on an 18-record 78-RPM set running a total of two hours and eight minutes. It was later transferred to LP.[2] It was the longest spoken word album made up to that time.[citation needed] The album gave millions of listeners who otherwise were unable to attend a theatrical performance a chance to hear Robeson as Othello and Ferrer as Iago.

With the advent of videocassettes and compact discs, however, original cast albums of non-musical plays, as well as spoken word albums of film soundtracks, went into a serious decline from which they have never completely recovered. CDs usually place more emphasis on music than on the spoken word, and there was little interest in only listening to a play or dialogue excerpts from a film when one could now buy plays and films on video and watch them at home whenever one wished. While the Cosby albums have resurfaced on CD, most of the other albums mentioned above have not. (Some of the Caedmon albums have been released on CD by Harper Audio, a division of HarperCollins, which now owns Caedmon.)[5] The 1968 album of Romeo and Juliet excerpts has also appeared on CD, and Pearl has issued the Robeson Othello in that medium, but the CD edition of the Othello has, unfortunately, attracted little attention in comparison to the history-making vinyl record release of the 1940s,[11] and now that Cyrano de Bergerac, A Man for All Seasons, the Olivier Othello, the Zeffirelli versions of Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew, the television version of Mark Twain Tonight, and Richard Burton's Hamlet are all available on DVD, this has become for most a more preferred way to experience these productions.

Although Naxos Records is a major producer of audiobooks, many famous spoken word recordings of the past, such as Columbia Masterworks' John Brown's Body and Don Juan in Hell have yet to be released on CD, although Don Juan in Hell has become available as an mp3 download. Whether or not it will appear in CD form is still unknown. Also online (but not yet on CD) is Capitol Records' The Story Teller: A Session with Charles Laughton, a Grammy-winning one-man stage performance by the actor, featuring dramatic readings from the Bible, Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw and Jack Kerouac, as well as autobiographical reminiscences.

There have been some spoken word albums over the past 15 years or so[citation needed][when?] recorded specifically for compact disk; these have often been combined with classical music. Among them are the Naxos audiobooks, as well as a Chandos Records series of albums which combine the music William Walton wrote for several Shakespeare production (including the Olivier film adaptations), with readings from the author performed by such actors as John Gielgud and Christopher Plummer.[citation needed] There is also a Hyperion Records stereophonic re-creation of Ralph Vaughan Williams' 1942 radio play adaptation of The Pilgrim's Progress, again with Gielgud. Excerpts from Gielgud's Grammy-winning one-man Shakespeare production Ages of Man (1959), once available on LP, are now available as a manufactured-on-demand CD.

Today, such websites as BBC, L.A. Theatre Works, The Hollywood Theater of the Ear, and ZBS offer full-length recordings on CD of their dramatic productions.[12] These recordings are possibly the closest that modern day discs have come to the spoken word albums of the 1960s.[citation needed]

The British component of the International Corpus of English contains 300 samples of speech, including dialogues, monologues, scripted material, and unscripted material - a total of over 70 hours of recorded speech. The recordings were made on analogue tapes. They have been computerized and aligned to the orthographic transcriptions.

Audio playback is a feature of ICECUP 3.1. The ICE-GB R2 Sound Recordings come on 11 CDs and are aligned with ICE-GB Release 2. If you order both the corpus and the audio, you can use ICECUP to hear speakers in the corpus.

The card catalog represented in this online database was first created by Work Projects Administration (WPA) workers in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and continued by the Archive of Folk Song (now part of the American Folklife Center) staff into the early 1960s. Its purpose was to provide the public with access to the thousands of individual songs, tunes, folk tales, sermons, monologues, and life stories in the Archive's collections.

Please note that this is a digitized collection of catalog cards, not of the audio recordings they represent. Most of these recordings are digitized, but only a fraction of them are available to hear online. If you find a card for a recording you wish to hear, you can search for it by title or number on the Library of Congress website to see if it is available. If you can't find it, feel free to contact us and we can suggest a way to hear it, either by coming to the Library or through another online resource.

Included are the seminal field recordings associated with John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax's Library of Congress collecting work (Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Jelly Roll Morton), and Alan Lomax's less well-known field collections in Haiti in 1936 to 1937 and in the upper Midwest of the United States in 1938. There are hundreds of well-known and lesser-known treasures by other notable collectors including Herbert Halpert, Zora Neale Hurston, Henrietta Yurchenco, Vance Randolph, and Helen Creighton, among many others. The catalog also reflects exchange projects with institutions outside the United States, notably the Discoteca Pública Municipal de São Paulo Collection (1938-1943) of field recordings from Brazil; and field recordings collected in Oceania. The researcher may encounter duplicate or multiple cards for some of the non-English recordings in this catalog. The researcher should also be aware that for some non-English recordings from this period, no cards were made. We hope to expand the catalog in the future and add the bibliographic data for the sound recordings that are now represented only as "Spanish" or "Foreign."

The physical card catalog in the Archive is searchable only by title, performer, state (if U.S.), shelflist number (AFS number), or country/language (other than English). The online version of the catalog searches these areas, plus recording dates, recordist's names, and many others.

Please note that this catalog represents only a portion of our recordings; in fact the majority of the Archive's recordings are not represented here. There is also information in the catalog that is incorrect and incomplete. We are continually working to make these corrections and to add more material to the database. If you see an error please feel free to notify us with corrections.

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