About Us

Hey there!

We’re Kat and Mark from High Level Listening, an upper-intermediate and advanced listening and speaking website for both students and teachers of English.

HLL is our answer to one of our biggest questions:

“Why does English listening practice sound so fake and scripted?”

As teachers, we’ve listened to hours and hours of terrible listening practice that we would never hear in the real world. We finally got so fed up with it that we developed our own site, High Level Listening.

What is HLL

High Level Listening is made of real, natural short conversations between two native English speakers. We’re perfect for intermediate students, and we’re great for advanced students who would like to sound more natural in their daily conversation.

We’ve branched out from 11 Vocabulary Topics with over 275 conversations to the IELTS Speaking Test to Role Plays and Common English Expressions. We’re currently working on expanding our Small Talk section with Worksheets and Transcripts in order to give students and teachers LOTS to learn and teach.

Why HLL is Different

We are not academic English listening practice. We don’t talk about bizarre topics that don’t apply to normal life. We don’t use a script (outside of our Role Plays), and we don’t sound condescending. You’re not a child, and we won’t treat you like one.

While Mark has a knack for using the perfect word in every situation, Kat tends to be much more casual in her vocabulary, using lots of natural or general phrasal verbs, making us a great combination for lots of different learners.

Professional Teachers

We’re young, currently active teachers with a combined 1,200 hours of teaching adults English conversation. We get that students want to sound normal and use words and phrases that people will understand right away. We love all of our students and want them to feel comfortable in any situation and any topic with native English speakers.

Casual, Conversational

We use slang (both casual and informal). We naturally run words together. We treat you like a normal person, so we don’t slow it down or divide our words up to make it “easier” to understand. We’re getting you ready for a real conversation.

American/British

Kat’s from Texas and Mark’s from Essex. We’re always learning new words and phrases from each other, and it’s fun to hear the differences in our accents and styles of English.

Thanks so much for reading and a big thanks to Teaching in Spain for giving us this opportunity!