Tips to improve your listening skills

Listening (noun): process of receiving, constructing meaning from, and responding to spoken and /
or nonverbal messages (according to the International Language Academy).

 Increase the amount of listening time both in and particularly out of class.
 Bear in mind how important listening is—the primary, most common and hardest skill to teach.
 Do regular “systematic-training” types of listening as homework, e.g. from the websites
mentioned below, the Workbook audio, forming a class listening club, and listening to audio
books or digitally-recorded novels, like the ones on <www.learnenglish.org.uk>.
 Regularly do varied, authentic listening too, e.g. listen to tonight’s TV movie / a song and
remember a phrase or some words to bring to the next class. Use (English) subtitled movies,
Internet sites with an audio facility, songs, TV, ads, news, poetry, extracts from plays, speeches,
lectures, phone conversations, informal dialogs, etc.
 Get used to making sense of connected speech as early as possible.
 Focus on how you came to that understanding and concentrate less on what you understand.
 Decipher texts which are just an “acoustic blur”—the way in which words, in the stream of
speech, do not have clearly defined beginnings and endings (CAULDWELL, Richard).
 Focus on what you did not understand as much as on what you understood.
 Don’t translate single / isolated words. You need to listen for “lexical bundles” (CAULDWELL,
Richard), groups of words that occur repeatedly together, i.e. chunks of language, phrases, etc.
 Don’t feel frustrated if you cannot understand as much as you expected. Try to listen for key
words—words that carry meaning.
 Discuss the language learning processes / problems of listening (in L1 if necessary), so you
become more active in your own development (e.g. do reflection tasks in small groups).
 Focus on what you have understood rather than on how difficult it is to understand everything.
 Do not panic while listening and learn to have a positive attitude towards listening.
 Be flexible: you can listen to and read the audio script. If you really can’t understand a recording,
there’s no point in playing it too many times, particularly with a longer listening.
 When you have long recordings, break them up and listen to different sections.
 Use audio scripts regularly and compare what you heard (or didn’t hear) with what is said. Do
not do a “listen and read” activity, where eyes will dominate over ears.
 Train listening to other sts.
 Create your own listening tasks, e.g. leaving a message for another student. You can record
yourself, other sts can record themselves and then you can swap recordings.
  Use video / DVDs as well as audio. Elicit / Contrast the differences the visual element provides.
Most listening is interactive and face to face, so lipreading and interpreting body gesture are
crucial in learning to listen.
 Do “live” listening whenever possible. Use your own stories as unscripted anecdotes to practice
listening comprehension. E.g.: before someone talks about his / her weekend or holiday, try to
pre-set a few questions, then listen to his / her story.
 Try record, share and compare techniques: <www.speechinaction.org/cool-speechhot-listening-
fluent-pronunciation/>.
 Learn to compensate for gaps in understanding / lack of familiarity with words.
 Expose yourself to “the difficult” aspects of listening, e.g. phoneme variations in connected
speech and weak forms.
 Think of processes used by L1 listeners: decoding sounds into words / clauses and building
larger-scale meaning.
 Study and interpret pairs of sentences: He said he called vs. He said he’d call.

Resources:
Listening in the Language Classroom, John Field (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Phonology for Listening: Teaching the Stream of Speech, Richard Cauldwell (Speech in Action, 2013).
See <www.speechinaction.com>.

Some listening websites for students

<www.esl-lab.com> – general listening quizzes organized by level.

<www.eleaston.com> – materials for teaching and learning English; they include all the skills.

<http://esl.about.com/cs/listening> – English listening skills and activities with effective listening

practice.

<http://iteslj.org/links/ESL/Listening/> – downloadable MP3 files, podcasts, and real audio.

<www.eviews.net> – more suitable for intermediate to advanced English students; contains MP3
files with several accents, such as Scottish and Australian.

<www.englishclub.com> – listening, speaking, reading, and writing activities; grammar,

pronunciation and vocabulary lessons; ESL games and quizzes.