Ways To Improve Your Listening Skill

Ways To Improve Your Listening Skill

Listening activities based on simulated real-life situations are more motivating and interesting to do than working through textbook comprehension exercises, which quickly becomes boring. Try some of the following listening texts and tasks that are likely to grab your student’s attention.

1. Predicting content 

If you are taking a listening test, skim through the questions first and try to predict what kind of information you need to listen out for. A question beginning 'How many..?', for example, will probably require you to listen for a specific number or quantity of something.

2. Listening for gist

Find a short video with subtitles on a topic that interests you. Use the title to help you predict the content and then listen out for the content words. Go back, and listen again with the subtitles. How much did you understand the first time? Return to the video a week later and try again.

Tip:

When you learn new words, try to group them with other words used in a similar context. Mind maps are good for this.

3.- Detecting signposts

Just like the traffic lights on roads, there are signposts in language that help us follow what we're listening to. These words, which link ideas, help us to understand what the speaker is talking about and where they are taking us. They're particularly important in presentations and lectures.

For example, if a university lecturer says: 'I am going to talk about three factors affecting global warming…' then later on you might hear the phrases first of all, moving on to and in summary to indicate the next part of the talk. Other words and phrases can function in a similar way. For instance, to clarify (in other words, to put it another way); to give examples (to illustrate this, for example'), and so on. 

4.- Listening for details

If you are taking a test, as soon as you get the question paper, skim through the questions, underline the important words and decide what kind of detail you need to identify in the listening text.

Decide on a type of detailed information you want to practise listening for and watch programmes where you would expect to get that information. For example, you could listen to a weather report to get details about the weather, or you could follow the sports news to find out the latest results.

Now using the techniques learned previously, access this link and perform the activities to improve your listening skill.

https://www.esolcourses.com/content/lifeintheuk/london/green-london/upper-intermediate-listening-lesson.html