How do I practise connected speech with a transcript?

Work from the printout backwards. Choose thirty to sixty seconds of audio with a published transcript, print ten lines, and predict before you listen: underline every place where a final consonant meets a vowel, circle every short grammar word, and mark the clusters where a consonant is likely to disappear. Then play the audio once and compare your predictions with what you heard, labelling each difference as merged, missing or ghost. Predicting first turns a transcript from a reading aid into a listening test, and it costs nothing but a pen.

Use only a verbatim transcript, and treat automatic captions as a rough guide, because they print clean word boundaries that hide every join. A second pass sharpens the drill: read the transcript aloud yourself, notice the exact place where you had to slow down, then replay the original at that point, since the place you stumble is usually the place where two words fused. Keep the twenty phrases that fooled you most in a note with the change labelled, and read that note before your next listening session instead of collecting more audio.

Why Fast English Sounds Like One Long Word: ielts listening tips for band 9 →