We all need to practice our listening skills, but it can be difficult.  Listening to the news can be boring.  Watching films or TV shows can be fun, but do we really understand what they said?  Can we remember it?  Sometimes we want to check if we really heard everything.

Librivox is a community of people who are trying to record all of the books in the public domain.  This means that all of their resources are 100% free and legal!  It also means that you won’t find Harry Potter there, but for a free resource it is really excellent.

How does it work?  Go to Librivox and do a search or just browse their collection.  I enjoy short stories, and I got a lot of results for “short” and “stories” when I searched for those terms.  You can also try terms like “poetry,” “ghost,” or “mystery.”  Click on one of the titles and on the next page you will be able to find links to the text and the recording.  Some readers are better than others (they are all volunteers), so try a different title if you don’t have a good reader.  Read along in the text as you listen, you’ll learn lots of new vocabulary as you improve your listening ability!