Spoken English is really challenging.

Pupils usually say they find listening the most difficult of the four skills. They often complain that 'English people speak too fast!' In informal spoken English people tend to speak in short bursts of words which are divided into tone units. These equate approximately to grammatical chunks. Speakers emphasise those words in a tone unit which carry the most meaning in order to get their message across. They make these words prominent by saying them louder, and/or making them longer and by changing the pitch, or tune. This helps the listener know which words to concentrate on. The problem for students is that the other words in a tone unit are not stressed and are therefore more difficult to hear. These special features of spoken English make it difficult for students to segment, i.e. to separate a stream of speech into the individual words uttered by the speaker. Often students fail to recognise even those words which are part of their active vocabulary when listening to informal spoken English.