by Sheetal Makhan With my office being on the fifth floor, I get to see the “regulars” of the Listening Center everyday! One student who is there daily is Ahmed Zubi. I was really interested to learn more about how this facility has helped Ahmed’s progress while studying English. Please read his piece below: Listening Center Benefits by Ahmed Zubi Nobody can argue that Listening is one of the most important communicating skills because it enables you to understand people and respond properly to them. That’s why language students ought to give it a considerable effort as well as the language centers ought to do. Listening will expose you to a variety of accents. Moreover it will improve your pronunciation, intonation and ellipsis which are not achievable by reading. However, as reading does, your collocations, structures and expressions will also be improved by listening. Having done both simultaneously, you’ll get most of the input skills, which you can imitate to express yourself. By listening and reading at the same time, your brain can subconsciously bind the word with its pronunciation, but that doesn’t mean you leave reading completely! Realizing all the above, I started going to the Listening Center on the 5th floor and I noted a significant improvement after about one month. In addition I got a better score in listening tests. The center contains a diverse collection of amazing books which explain quaint natural facts such as world wonders. Others speak about courage and people experience, although the majority have been stories of different sorts. They are thought-provoking detective stories, romantic, courage, poignant stories narrated in an fascinating way and taken from different countries (UK, USA, India, South Africa, Ireland and Thailand). However some of them has a message which I disagree with, but it’s  the language that you should seek, not only the ideas. … Read more