What are your plans for your next holiday? Where are you going, and what are you planning to do? Listen to two people talking about their holiday plans and learn some useful new vocabulary for talking about your holiday plans in this Oxford Online English listening lesson for intermediate learners.
Listen to the dialogue at normal speed here:
or listen to a slower version here:
Woman: So, do you have any holiday plans for the summer?
Man: Yeah, I’m thinking of going to Wales for a week.
Woman: Wales? I’ve never been there. What’s it like?
Man: It’s pretty rural, so if you like the big city life, you won’t find much there. But the countryside is very beautiful, and the people are always really friendly.
Woman: Have you been there before?
Man: Yeah, quite a few times, actually.
Woman: So, what’s the plan? Are you travelling around, or staying in one place?
Man: I’ve rented a cottage. I’m just planning to do some hiking—Wales is quite mountainous.
Woman: Ooh! Sounds very exciting. Not my thing, though—I prefer a more relaxing holiday.
Man: What about you then? Do you have any plans?
Woman: Well, I’d like to go somewhere hot and just lie on the beach for a week. I don’t really care where, but I’m not sure if I can get the time off work.
Man: That’s too bad.
Woman: Are there any beaches in Wales?
Man: There are, but you might not like them very much.
Woman: Oh, how come?
Man: They’re beautiful, but it can get very windy, and you wouldn’t want to lie on the beach—you’d get cold!
Woman: Yeah, doesn’t sound like fun to me.
Man: Well, each to their own…
Making Holiday Plans – exercise 1
Comprehension: building speaker profiles
To understand the context of a conversation, you need to collect information about the speakers. When you build a profile of someone, it helps you predict what they might say. This can be useful if you don’t understand everything – you can make an educated guess.
Listen to the full dialogue and read five statements. Decide if the statements refer to the woman or the man.
Making Holiday Plans – exercise 2
Grammar: talking about future plans
The dialogue includes a number of different ways to refer to something about the future. When an activity is in the future, the planning is usually in the present, and even past events might be relevant, so you need a range of verb forms.
Listen to five sentences from the dialogue and complete the gaps with the verb forms you hear.
Making Holiday Plans – exercise 3
Vocabulary: describing holiday destinations
The two speakers are describing types of place to go on holiday, the people they’d meet there and the experiences they might have. To do this, they use some very common adjectives.
Listen to the full dialogue again and pay attention to the adjectives. Then, complete the sentences with one word from the recording in each gap.
Making Holiday Plans – exercise 4
Listening skill: understanding reactions
When you have conversations, you sometimes know what the other person thinks, because it’s clear from what they say. At other times, they might not say exactly what they think, but you can detect clues from their intonation. This exercise includes a mix of both types of reaction.
Listen to five parts of the dialogue. Each time you will hear a comment or question from one speaker, followed by the start of the other person’s response. Choose what the reactions mean.
