Many students ask me how they can improve their listening abilities when learning English. Much focus is placed on speaking and understanding grammatical structures, but listening often gets pushed into second, third or even fourth place. So here are my top 5 tips to improve your listening skills so you actually understand what the other is saying.
Listening is a key skill to speaking a language, without it you can’t answer effectively. You can have all the vocabulary in the world, but if you can’t understand the person that you’re talking to, the conversation is going nowhere. If you put in place these 5 tips for improving your listening, I guarantee you that you will see improvement.
- Plan when you’re going to do listening.
Just like sitting down to go through some verb tenses or to do some writing, you need to plan and dedicate time to listening. Make it manageable, do two listening activities twice a day, 15 minutes each, maybe before breakfast or at lunchtime, whatever suits your schedule. But! Plan it, and do it. Cut out all distractions and focus 100% on listening to something in English. It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand 100%, maybe a word or two is not clear, that’s totally ok. But do the listening twice a day, 15 minutes each time. - Make it interesting.
There is nothing more likely to stop you from doing your two sessions a day than listening to something that you’re not interested in. You’re always going to be more motivated when you’re listening to something that you enjoy, so choose wisely. Watch a series in English and make sure it’s of a level that is suitable for you, otherwise you’re going to get frustrated and stop after two or three attempts. Listen to podcasts, the radio, news items, anything that you’re interested in and would want to listen to if it were in your native language. - Listen in chunks.
Instead of doing a 15 minute session and getting to the end, break the listening up into small chunks. Always listen to something first to get a general idea of what it’s about, then listen again and focus on small areas. Spend 2 minutes listening then stop and really think about what you’ve heard, listen to it again if you need to. It’s important that you really focus your ear on what is being said, so repeating chunks a few times to really understand is great practice, but again, don’t worry if one or two words are not clear for you. - Active not Passive
When you do that listening activity, you need to be actively involved in the listening. That means really listening to it, not just passively listening with it in the background or whilst you’re texting a friend or cooking the dinner. You need to actively listen, which means going back and listening to the same thing a few times until you get it, this tells your brain that this is important and it’s going to dedicate more attention to it. That’s how you learn, really, you just need to show up, focus and do the listening, I promise, it really does work that way. - Speak it
A great way to affirm what you’re hearing is to speak it. By saying out loud the words that you’re hearing you are doing a pretty powerful thing in your brain. Your brain takes what it has heard and turns it into speech, this really does put the words deeper into your understanding and trains your ear to hear those words more easily.
So there you have my top 5 tips for improving your listening ability. I promise, if you do this you will see improvement, but you need to do it everyday!
In the future I’ll write a post with some example series for you to watch for your level. In our previous post, we talked about keeping yourself in the zone, so that your learning is effective. You can read that post here. Take care, and keep listening!
