(Academic Skills) Unit 10: Shopping

Focus: listening for key points, noticing the use of discourse markers.

This unit has a listening about something called "mystery shopping"

What do you think mystery shopping is?

mystery shopper

noun

plural noun: mystery shoppers

1. a person employed to visit a shop or restaurant incognito in order to assess the quality of the goods or services.

Look at the following words related to “mystery”

secret

incognito

furtive

clandestine

surreptitious

stealthy

cloak-and-dagger

closet

concealed

sly

sneaky

underhand

undercover

hush-hush

Do any have positive connotations?

Before listening, guess the answers to the following:

Mystery Shopping:

Two kinds: 

Two industries:

Four benefits:

Problem:

Discuss 

1. Do you have a problem with the idea of companies monitoring staff performance through the use of mystery shoppers?

2. What about other variants of the same idea, i.e. other kinds of mystery customer?

3. Are there more transparent ways to gather this kind of information?

Skills focus - Listening to a sequence of ideas

Listen to the middle section of the presentation. Fill in the gaps.

1 There are ______________ benefits that people mention.

2 _____________, um, it allows companies to monitor …

3 And the ________________is, it allows companies to be more …

4 And a _____________ is, it can be a good way to …

5 And there’s also a ____________if a company also uses …

Answer the questions.

1 What is the function of the words in the gaps?

2 In examples 2 to 5, which word is strongly stressed?

3 In examples 2 to 4, what does the speaker do after the word ‘is’?

4 In example 5, where does the speaker pause?

5 In what way are the answers to questions 1 to 4 useful for when you are doing a seminar presentation?