Ah, hello everyone, Anna here from EnglishLikeANative.co.uk
In today’s lesson we’re going to look at 5 ways to improve your English listening skills.
The first thing to do is expand your vocabulary.
Now expanding your vocabulary might not seem like it's strictly related to listening,
but hear me out, “hear me” out means listen to what I have to say before making a judgement.
A lot of students have problems with listening because they don't
know the words that the person is saying.
Studies show that students need to first understand the words
in the text that's being spoken to understand what's being said.
So, expanding your vocabulary only gives you a better chance of knowing more words
in the listening piece and this will help your understanding of the overall
piece, which is especially useful in standardised tests such as the IELTS exam.
Remember that knowing the word means understanding the meaning, but also knowing the word class - is
it a noun, a verb, or an adjective, for example, register, collocations, and pronunciation.
This brings me on to my 2nd tip…
Number 2!
Improve your pronunciation.
By improving your pronunciation, you give yourself a better chance
of understanding a word when someone says it.
I have often had students who understand the majority of
English that’s written down but don’t understand words when they are spoken.
That’s sometimes because they think the word will sound different,
because they haven’t learnt the correct pronunciation of the word.
For example, in many English words that have two vowels in a row, learners expect there
to be two sounds but there’s often just one so they don’t recognise a word like
‘cousin’ when they would easily understand that word written down.
There’s just one vowel sound in the first syllable of ‘cousin’, /ˈkʌ/, /ˈkʌ/, /ˈkʌzən/.
Say it with me, ‘/ˈkʌzən/’, ‘/ˈkʌzən/’.
Now English pronunciation is one of my specialist subjects,
and something I can really help you with, if you are keen to improve your
pronunciation then hit that subscribe button and write “Help me Anna” in the comments.
Number 3!
So, the 3nd strategy for improving your listening
is to become familiar with the rules of connected speech.
Learning how to say individual words is really important but
you should dedicate some time to learning about full phrases too.
If you want to check out my tips for connected speech in more detail,
you can watch my video “How to Sound Like a Native English Speaker: Connected Speech”.
But, basically when we speak at a natural speed in English, sounds often disappear, change,
get mixed together or sometimes sounds appear out of nowhere!
For example, let’s take the sentence “Can you tell me what you’re looking for”.
“Can you tell me what you’re looking for.”
When we say this sentence quickly, you may be confused by the ‘what you’re’ part.
That’s because when we have a /t/ and a /j/ sound together, they mix together to make a /tʃ/
sound – ‘wɒtʃu’, ‘wɒtʃu’.
The next thing to notice in this sentence is
the sound in the ‘you’ is shorter than a lot of people expect too.
We normally say /jə/ instead of /ju:/ and the auxiliary verb ‘are’ almost disappears.
Additionally, the sound at the end of ‘looking’ changes,
so the last part of the sentence isn’t ‘what you’re looking for’, but ‘what ya lookin’ for’.
At the beginning of the sentence, the ‘you’ becomes /jə/ too and we find that same vowel
sound in ‘can’ (/kən/), so the whole sentence is “Can you tell me what you’re looking for?”
“Can you tell me what you’re looking for?”
That’s a lot of changes in just this one example.
Don’t worry about learning all the rules together but if you can learn them bit by bit,
it will really help you understand natural speech when you listen to it!
Number 4.
My next tip is to be realistic about what you can listen to and how long you can listen for.
If you’re an intermediate student,
watching a whole film without subtitles is just perhaps a bit too much.
Start out small, maybe ten minutes a day,
using materials that are made for language learners, like videos or podcasts.
The internet is full of great resources. It’s better to start small and do good quality work,
then build it up bit by bit, then start too big and be discouraged.
That would be the worst thing. I will leave a link
to my podcast in the description if you haven't yet discovered it.
Number 5
When you find a video or podcast you like, my next tip is to listen to it again and again.
You won’t understand everything you hear the first time.
And that’s totally normal. Even in our native languages, we don’t hear everything all the time.
We have to fill in some gaps. In a language we’re still learning,
filling in the gaps is extremely difficult because we just don’t have the vocabulary,
grammar or pronunciation knowledge to do that. So, listening again and again even if it’s only
to specific parts you found very difficult. This will help you to fill in those gaps. You may need
to listen more than five times and that’s ok! The effort you make now will help you in the future.
Also, identifying the parts you don’t understand and keeping a record of the
problem areas will help you build up your own personal bank of common problems to overcome.
Then you’ll know what to listen out for the next time you’re trying some listening practice.
Bonus Tip!
After listening multiple times, check the transcription, listen back again and repeat.
This will help you develop your understanding of the relationship between letters and sounds,
especially when a native speaker talks naturally and quickly.
Listening and reading at the same time is a really useful trick for training your ear.
And going back again and shadowing the piece you're
finding particularly difficult that will just be phenomenal.
So why not give it a go right now! There’s a link
for you because you stayed all the way to the end of the video.
There's a link for you to download a FREE transcript to one of my popular podcast episodes.
There you go. That was five or rather six,
with the bonus, ways to improve your English listening skills.
Until next time, take care and goodbye!