How do you practice listening skills?

A 5-Step Method to Improve Your Listening Skills

Lets talk listening skills. Do you remember how you felt the first time you heard someone speak your target language?

Bamboozled?

Personally, Ive always found listening to be the most difficult language learning skill. Maybe you feel the same way?

In this post, well look at the key to improving your listening and Ill share the method I use to work on my listening skills.

One the reasons I used to struggle with listening is that I didnt really know how to practice it. Should you read along while you listen or should you listen without a text? What should you listen to? Do you need to translate every single word?

I had many failed experiments when I first started learning Spanish and it took me a long time to figure out the best methods to practice my listening skills.

In fact, it was only when I moved to Argentina that I finally realised what I needed to do to improve my listening and I discovered it somewhat by accident! Before I arrived in Buenos Aires, I thought my Spanish was pretty good. Then I landed and I couldnt understand anything! It was a bit of a baptism of fire! On the bus, in the supermarket, no matter where I went I found myself smiling, nodding and desperately trying to work out what people were saying to me.

However, over the coming weeks and months my listening skills began to significantly improve and this taught me a very valuable lesson: To improve your listening skills, you have to truly listen. You have to listen with focus and attentiveness. Passively listening to things you dont understand is never going to work.

I was forced to do this because Id moved to a new country where most people dont speak English very well and I had to figure out how to get by. But the same concept applies whether youre travelling abroad or learning the language from home. Active listening, not passive listening, is what will give you results.

Passive vs. Active Listening: Whats the Difference?

Why Passive Listening Doesnt Work

What is passive listening? Passive listening is when you listen to something without giving it your full attention. For example, you put on French radio in the background while youre working, or listen to Spanish music without really paying attention to the lyrics.

Passive listening doesnt work because basically youre not really listening! Youre doing something else it could be working, sleeping or daydreaming rather than actually listening to the sounds. When you listen this way, you cant just expect to suddenly understand everything youre hearing.

Think about it. Even in English, we dont remember things or understand them unless we actually pay attention to them. For example, lots of people like to have the radio on in their kitchen while cooking or in the morning while having breakfast. Maybe you do this too. But how much of what you hear do you actually remember? If youre being honest, very little because you werent really listening. You might remember a particular song you like or something important that was mentioned on the news but unless you actually try to focus on what youre listening to, most of it goes in one ear and out the other.

Since thats what happens with our native language, why do we think doing the same thing in another language will give us different results?

The idea of passive learning is appealing because it promises results without much work. But the truth is that it just doesnt deliver on those promises. If youre spending time passively listening as part of your core language learning, its time to stop and start practicing more efficiently instead.

Dont get me wrong, theres no harm surrounding yourself in the language by having music or radio playing in the background while youre in the kitchen or while youre reading a book. Youll still pick some things every now and again when a particular word or phrase catches your attention. Just dont let passive listening become the foundation of your how you work on your listening skills. To really see predictable, sustainable results you need to practice listening in a more focused way.

Why Listening Needs to be Active

Your brain needs you to bring attention to things to remember them.

By paying close attention to something and repeating it multiple times, you send a clear message to your brain that something is important and needs to be remembered. This obviously applies to things like learning vocabulary but its also true when it comes to the other parts of listening, including sounds, accents, intonation or phrasing. You need to bring attention to them. Thats why its important to listen actively rather than passively when you practice.

Another reason to practice active listening is to get used to differences between how words sound on their own and how they sound in context. Native speakers often smash words together when they speak. We do this ourselves in English. For example, in American English the phrase whats up? often sounds more like wassup? or in Hiberno-English a greeting like hows it going? often becomes howsagoin?

These are things we take for granted in our native languages but when you hear such transformations in a foreign language, they can leave you totally lost!

Thats why sometimes you might know a word but not recognise it when you hear it because the sounds mutate when they're spoken together rapidly by native speakers. This is one of the many reasons why focused listening practice is important. Just learning individual words isnt enough. You need to hear how these words sound and appear in context and thats not something you can pick up passively. Learning new words but never hearing them isn't sufficient when it comes to high level, real-life conversation.

So how can you go about practicing your listening skills in a more active way and what kind of materials should you practice with?

The Tools You Need to Improve Your Listening Skills

I suggest using a language resource that contains both audio and a text transcript. The main reason for this is so that you can check your comprehension when you listen to something new. Its always good to listen without a text first to really test yourself, but its very useful to have a text or transcription so you can check your understanding afterwards.

Here are some ideas for materials you could use to practice with:

• A scene from a movie or tv show [+ the subtitles]
• A podcast episode you have a transcript for
• A video on Euronews or another news site
• A YouTube video with a transcription
• A book in print and audiobook format
• Dialogues and their transcription
• An Assimil course
• LingQ
• Textbook audio and text

When practicing your listening skills, I would always suggest working with a short audio clip of no more than three or four minutes. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, unless youre at an advanced level, long clips are exhausting! Secondly, as youll see, repetition is an important part of the learning process. Working with short clips means you can easily listen to them multiple times. Besides, theres much more value in working with a short clip and learning it well than working with a longer one and not examining it in any real depth.

If you spend half an hour working with a single three minute clip, youll be able to listen to it multiple times, look up what you dont understand and repeatedly hear the new words and phrases you come across. On the other hand, if you work for half an hour with a 15 or 20 minute audio clip, you wont have time to repeat the audio, and you may only hear each new word once or twice. You cant really do this and expect to remember very much of what you learned a few days later.

Finally, I strongly suggest that you think carefully about the content of the materials you choose and find things that cover topics that are important to you. Fluency doesnt require you to know every word in the dictionary. It just requires you to know the words youre going to need in the conversations youre going to have. Think about the kind of things youre actually going to want to or need to talk about in your target language and choose your materials accordingly. That way you can ensure that youre learning vocabulary that directly improves your ability to use the language.

Now thats the groundwork explained, heres my five step method to improve your listening skills.

A 5-Step Method to Improve Your Listening Skills

Step 1: Listen to the Audio No Reading!

The first step in this method is to simply listen to the audio alone. Dont read the text in advance and dont follow along with it as you listen. The point here is to focus solely on your aural skills and see how much you can understand without any visual aid.

Of course, unless youre already at a very high level, this can be very difficult. Rather than trying to understand every single word, its better to focus on trying to understand the gist of whats being said.

See if you can pick out some key words or phrases that might give you an idea of whats being said and note them down. Find anything at all that you can cling on to and youll be able to use this as starting point to learn more from the context.

Step 2: Repeat!

Its not time to look at the text just yet. Many learners make the mistake of turning to the text too quickly. However, the point here is to practice your listening skills so just stay focused on listening for the time being.

On the first listen, youll probably have identified one or two key words or ideas. As you repeat the audio, listen carefully and see if you can pick out and words or phrases you may have missed the first time. By now you may already have some idea what this piece of audio is about, so use the context to your advantage. If you cant figure out exactly whats going on, dont worry. Just note down any keywords you do understand or words that seem important.

At this stage, Id suggest listening at least three more times. With each listen, you can add a little more to your comprehension. Your goal should be to try and use all of your current knowledge in the language to understand as much as possible from the audio before you read the text. When you feel youve reached a point where theres nothing more you can take from the recording, its time to move onto the next step.

Step 3: Get Reading

Now its time to look at the text. Read through it and check how much you understood from your listening. Did you get the gist of it?

As you read through the text, identify any new words you come across. See if you can guess the meaning of the words from their context; otherwise, look them up in a dictionary. If there are any new words that you think will be particularly useful for you in conversation, write them down and add them to your list of new vocabulary to learn.

As well as new words you havent seen before, youll also likely find words in the text that you already know but didnt understand! Some words can sound quite different when spoken together and at native level speed. Pay careful attention to these words and be sure to listen out for them when you repeat the audio.

Step 4: Listen With the Text

Once youve read through the text a few times and looked up any words you didnt understand, you should be confident about its meaning. Next, I suggest listening again a couple of more times while you read along with the text.

This is the one time during the process that youre using aural and visual stimuli together, so take advantage of it. Try to connect the written words to the sounds and pay special attention to phrases or groups of words and how theyre pronounced.

If there were a lot of new words in the text youre working on, trying breaking the audio down into smaller chunks as you continue to repeat it. Rather than repeating the whole recording at once, you can work through paragraph by paragraph if you prefer.

I tend to repeat this step at least twice to help build connections between the written and spoken words.

Step 5: Listen Again Without the Text

Finally, go back and listen again a few more times without the text. By this point, you should be able to understand almost everything quite well even without the visual aid of the text.

Over the next few days, its good to listen back to the clip again whenever you have a chance. Download the recording to your phone so you can have a quick listen any time you get a few free minutes. With each extra repetition your comfort level will grow. Because youre now able to understand the words and phrases you studied without any visual aid, youll also find it easier to recognise this vocabulary when it comes up conversations or in other recordings you listen to.

In Conclusion: Theres no Quick Fix for Listening Skills

Whether youre learning a language or any other skill, theres no magic solution.

Improving your listening skills takes time and a lot of focused listening but if you work at it in the right way you can actually make significant improvements faster than you might think.