Improving Your Listening Skills
- Use the resources in your community to practice listening to English.
- Visit places in your community where you can hear English spoken.
- Go to an English school, an embassy or an English-speaking Chamber of Commerce.
- Go to a museum and take an audio tour in English.
- Follow a guided tour in English of your city.
- Call or visit a hotel where tourists stay and get information in English about room rates, hotel availability or hotel facilities.
- Call and listen to information recorded in English, such as a movie schedule, a weather report or information about an airplane flight.
- Watch or listen to programs recorded in English.
- Watch television programs.
- CNN, the Discovery Channel or National Geographic
- Watch movies, soap operas or situation comedies
- Rent videos or go to a movie in English.
- Listen to a book on tape in English.
- Listen to music in English and then check your accuracy by finding the lyrics on the Internet (e.g., www.lyrics.com).
- Watch television programs.
- Go to Internet sites to practice listening.
- National Public Radio (www.npr.org)
- CBS News (www.cbsnews.com)
- Randall's Cyber Listening Lab (www.esl-lab.com)
- BBC World Service.com Learning English (www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish)
- Get CDs with full-length lectures. Full-length lectures/presentations are available from UC Berkeley.
- Practice speaking English with others.
- Look for a conversation partner and exchange language lessons with an English speaker who wants to learn your language.
- Visit places in your community where you can hear English spoken.
- Begin to prepare for academic situations.
- Visit academic classes, cultural centers, or museums where people are invited to talk in English about their work.
- Before you listen to a lecture in English, read assigned chapters or background information on academic topics.
- Visit lectures on a wide variety of topics.
- Record lectures or presentations and replay them several times.
- Listen to different types of talks on various topics, including subjects in which you have limited or little background.
- Listen to short sections several times until you understand the main points and the flow of ideas.
- Stop the recording in the middle and predict what will come next.
- Practice listening to longer lectures.
- Become familiar with the organization or structure of lectures.
- Pay attention to the structure.
- lecture or presentation — introduction, body, and conclusion
- narrative story — beginning, middle, and end
- Learn to recognize different styles of organization.
- theory and evidence
- cause and effect
- steps of a process
- comparison of two things
- Pay attention to the structure.
- Think carefully about the purpose of a lecture.
- Try to answer the question, "What is the professor trying to accomplish in this lecture?"
- Write down only the information that you hear. Be careful not to interpret information based on your personal understanding or knowledge of the topic.
- Answer questions based on what was actually discussed in the talk
- Develop a note-taking strategy to help you organize information into a hierarchy of main points and supporting details.
- Make sure your notes follow the organization of the lecture.
- Listen for related ideas and relationships within a lecture and make sure you summarize similar information together.
- Use your notes to write a summary.
- Visit academic classes, cultural centers, or museums where people are invited to talk in English about their work.
- Listen for signals that will help you understand the organization of a talk, connections between ideas, and the importance of ideas.
- Listen for expressions and vocabulary that tell you the type of information being given.
- Think carefully about the type of information that these phrases show.
- opinion (I think, It appears that, It is thought that)
- theory (In theory)
- inference (therefore, then)
- negatives (not, words that begin with "un," "non," "dis," "a")
- fillers (non-essential information) (uh, er, um)
- Identify digressions (discussion of a different topic from the main topic) or jokes that are not important to the main lecture [It’s okay not to understand these!]
- Think carefully about the type of information that these phrases show.
- Listen for signal words and phrases that connect ideas in order to recognize the relationship between ideas.
- Think carefully about the connection between ideas that these words show.
- reasons (because, since)
- results (as a result, so, therefore, thus, consequently)
- examples (for example, such as)
- comparisons (in contrast, than)
- an opposing idea (on the other hand, however)
- another idea (furthermore, moreover, besides)
- a similar idea (similarly, likewise)
- restatements of information (in other words, that is)
- conclusions (in conclusion, in summary)
- Think carefully about the connection between ideas that these words show.
- Pay attention to intonation and other ways that speakers indicate that information is important.
- Listen for emotions expressed through changes in intonation or stress.
- Facial expressions or word choices can indicate excitement, anger, happiness, frustration, etc.
- Listen how native speakers divide long sentences into "thought groups" to make them easier to understand. (A thought group is a spoken phrase or short sentence. Thought groups are separated by short pauses.)
- Listen to sets of thought groups to make sure you get the whole idea of the talk
- Listen for important key words and phrases which are often ...
- repeated
- paraphrased (repeated information but using different words)
- said louder and clearer
- stressed
- Listen for pauses between important points.
- In a lecture, pay attention to words that are written on the board.
Reference : https://www.ets.org/toefl/ibt/scores/improve/advice_listening_high