[jammer113]

For the student who has trouble understanding... filling in the information will sort of be helpful, but it's so time-consuming.

But like you said, you struggle too, but you still understand. That's because you use both top-down and bottom-up techniques for understanding what is being said.

For top-down techniques, you basically already know the topic, you can already guess what's going to be said, and so you sort of fill in the blanks. Even if you don't know exactly, the range of choices is so limited, you can be pretty sure on any given word, even if the accent is difficult.

For bottom-up techniques, your brain analyzes every sound as it comes in and interprets them. As soon as you get a slightly different vowel because of a different accent, your brain either slows down and gets lost in the conversation, or just misses things all together.

It sounds like your student has good bottom-up technique, but poor top-down technique.

In part, watching movies and such will really help him get all the little words he normally misses. I personally suggest watching with English subtitles on, so that he can identify individual sounds with individual words.

But another thing that would be great is simply for him to voraciously read everything that has to do with his business. If he can build a large enough knowledge base about his business in English, then he can better anticipate what anybody is going to say on any particular topic.

Both of those suggestions has him doing all of the work, which is what he really needs. He just needs to spend hours and hours.