Listening Skill

Improving Your Listening Skills

1. 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).
   • 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.
2. 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
   • 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.
3. 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!]
• 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)
• 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