open cloze | EnglishFiles.com

Hello by Adele — a listening comprehension exercise

Hello is one of Adele’s greatest hits: it broke the Vevo Record by achieving over 27.7 million views within a 24-hour span and it reached the number one spot in almost every country.

This is a listening comprehension exercise based on the song: watch the video and complete the lyrics by filling the gaps. Feel free to stop the playback whenever you need to. You can also ask for letter hints if you can’t find a word.

The difficulty of this task is around B2 level (upper-intermediate) as the vocabulary is not too difficult and Adele’s singing voice is fairly easy to understand.

A previous exercise on EnglishFiles.com featured another famous Adele song, Someone Like You.

There will be more exercises based on both these songs, including text reconstruction, reading comprehension and vocabulary exercises, so please check back.

And please don’t forget to like our Facebook page to get updates and find other useful links for learners of English.

No Ordinary Love — Sade: a listening comprehension exercise

This is a listening comprehension exercise based on Sade’s song, No Ordinary Love. Listen to the song and complete the lyrics by filling the gaps with one word in each gap. Feel free to stop (or even rewind) the video whenever you need to.

The difficulty of this task is about intermediate level (B1 on the CEFR scale).

Earlier we showed another exercise based on this same song: this is a text reconstruction task, where you have enter all the words on your own.

More exercises on this song will be coming later, including vocabulary and reading comprehension tasks, so don’t forget to come back.

And please remember to like our Facebook page to get updates and other useful links for learners of English.

Space Oddity by David Bowie — fill the gaps: a listening comprehension exercise

David Bowie’s Space Oddity is famous for many reasons: for example, it was recorded before the first Moon landing — which is pretty cool, considering its topic. It is also the song that was used for the first ever music video recorded in space, by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station.

Your task here is to listen to the song and complete the lyrics; feel free to stop the video whenever you like.

This listening comprehension exercise is below B2 level on the CEFR scale (about intermediate level).

There will be more exercises based on this song, including vocabulary and reading.

Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen – an open cloze listening comprehension exercise

Here’s another exercise based on Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah – this one is also a listening comprehension task, but a bit more difficult than the previous version because here you have to find the words on your own as there is no list to choose from (this is called an open cloze test).

You can try an easier version of the same song here – you only have to choose the words from a list in this exercise.

Earlier we featured two other Leonard Cohen songs, Suzanne and Famous Blue Raincoat – make sure you check out those exercises too.

More tasks will follow based on this song.