Practice Your Listening

Practice Your Listening

Hello! This week on Ask a Teacher, we answer a question from Zekeriya in Turkiye about listening to English.

Question

Dear teacher,

When I practice listening, I focus a lot and do a lot of repetitions. After a while, I realized that I was actually memorizing the audio recording instead of practicing listening. How do you think I should do an ideal listening exercise?

Thank you,

Zekeriya

Answer

I’m happy to answer this question, Zekeriya.

There is not one ideal listening exercise. Instead, there are several good ways to improve your listening.

The repetitions you are doing can be necessary and helpful for you to understand what you hear. And repetitions likely help you remember new words and how to pronounce them. But let’s look at more ways you can practice listening.

Listening methods

First, try to find listening material that is just a bit above your ability. This will help you learn new words without making it too difficult for you.

It is best to listen to English material that has words written either in captions or in the body text, such as a VOA Learning English article. This will help check your listening.

• You can test yourself by first listening to parts of the audio without reading the words.
• Note the main ideas and the things you clearly understood.
• Then, listen to it again and try to understand more details. This is when you can do shorter repetitions.
• Next, you can check how much you understood by reading the words as you listen to the audio again.

Transcribing

One of the best ways to practice listening is by writing every word you hear. This is called transcribing. Even with audio examples as short as one minute, you can learn a lot of English using this method. For example, if you are transcribing an interview, you might notice differences between spoken English and written English.

By transcribing, you can notice and learn new expressions, grammar rules and spelling. This method also helps make new words stay in your memory when you read them. That is because you are discovering the answer to a problem you have already tried to solve through listening.

Other tips

Try listening to English spoken at different speeds. Over time, you can follow spoken English at a faster speed. Many videos online let you increase or decrease the speed of playback.

Practice listening to English spoken in different foreign accents. This is a useful skill because English is spoken in so many places around the world.

Center your listening on specific sounds or grammatical points. For example, preposition use in English can be difficult. Try listening for prepositions and the words they connect with. This can help you use them correctly in your speaking and writing.

Remember that, like any skill, you can improve listening by practicing often and having detailed plans for the methods you will use.

For our readers and listeners, what are your questions about American English? We’d like to hear from you. Send us an email at learningenglish@voanews.com. And please include where you are from in your email, too.

And that’s Ask a Teacher.

I’m Andrew Smith.

Andrew Smith wrote this lesson for VOA Learning English.

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Words in This Story

focus –v. to center one's attention on something

memorize –v. to learn something so you remember it exactly

ideal –adj. having the qualtiy of being exaclty what you want or the highest quality

captions –n. words that show on screen in a video that match the words being spoken

interview -n. a conversation in which a journalist asks questions to someone such as a famous person or government official.

accent –n. a way of pronouncing words that shows what country or background a person comes from