Week-6: (課文) How to Improve your English Listening

Week-6: 課文

How to Improve your English Listening

Tip 1: Start with a Positive Mindset

The first thing you want to learn to do is to listen optimistically.

Why? You have to actually believe that you can hear and understand what people are saying.

I know English listening can be very difficult, especially with speakers who have a strong accent or who talk really fast. But you’ve actually done it before! You learned how to listen and understand and speak a language when you were a baby. Why should it be any different now that you’re an adult? If you listen with a good frame of mind, you’ll see it’s not impossible.

Tip 2: Choose Diverse English Listening Materials

Don’t just listen to the same kind of English audio materials all the time.

Don’t stick to listening to only the news, or only watching the same TV shows over and over. Instead, listen to a variety of different kinds of situations and topics.

As long as you find a resource that makes you happy, keeps you learning English by listening and lines up with your goals and interests, you have my full support.

Tip 3: Predict Audio Content

Pretend you’re listening to the radio.

You hear a helicopter in the background, and a speaker is mentioning the names of streets, roads and avenues, and talking about how many vehicles are currently on these roads.

What do you imagine he’s talking about? Most likely, you’re listening to a traffic report.

You can then expect to hear other words like “bottleneck,” “traffic jam” and “rush hour.” You’ll probably also hear the imperative (command form of verbs): “Don’t take the highway” or “Avoid 4th Avenue.”

Based on the context, you can often predict the words and even style of language you will hear. That’s a big first step forward!

Next time you’re watching or listening to an English TV show or the radio, pause after every few sentences. Try to predict what’s going to happen or what the speaker might say next.

For instance, the words “avenue,” “vehicle,” “jam,” “bottle” and “neck” all have their own separate meanings, but when you hear them together, they form the context of a traffic-related conversation.

Tip 4: Listen for the Big Ideas

At first, you should resist the impulse to try to understand every single word people are saying.

It’s more important to keep up with the conversation and try to understand the main ideas.

English is like a road. As with any road, there are “signposts,” which are words that help us follow the sequence of what’s going on—in this case, they help us understand what we’re hearing. These words link ideas and help us understand what people are talking about. They’re especially relevant in talks or presentations.

For example, if a university professor giving a lecture says, “I will talk about three reasons supporting…” be on the lookout for expressions such as “first of all,” “moving on to” and “in summary,” that link the ideas and indicate the next parts of the lecture.

Focus on keywords like these to grasp the most relevant parts of a conversation. Once you relax and make it a priority to understand the main idea, you’ll have the freedom to complete your comprehension with the details and clear the air later by asking questions.

Tip 5: Listen for the Details

After you’ve focused on the big picture, now look for specific details that will help you understand better.

When listening for details, you’re interested in very specific information such as a name or a number. Ignore anything else that doesn’t sound relevant to what you’re listening for. This way, you’ll be able to zoom in your search and get the details you need to understand the message.

For example, if you’re interested in knowing the age of a person, pay attention to any words related to age like “old,” “years,” “born in” or even a number, which could be that person’s age.