WHAT WE COULD DO TO BE PROFICIENT IN ENGLISH LISTENING
Those eager to have a great improvement in English listening skill may wonder about the questions below. Why I fail to catch the certain part of the sentence to figure out the meaning of it? What get in the way of listening comprehension? What to do to make English listening a piece of cake to me?
When it comes to English listening, there are mainly three causes behind our not understanding what we have heard, speed, pronunciation, and accent. In brief, we don't understand it since it is not pronounced in a friendly way within our expectation, and our ears have no patience and receptivity to the voice strange to us. Therefore, to improve English listening, we need to make it familiar to us by increasing the frequency of input, getting acquainted with the three elements mentioned above.
1 LEARN SOMETHING ABOUT PRONUNCIATION RULE
Have you got this experience where you keep listening to a certain material for several times but fail to understand what's about, however, you know it well after you have a glance of the text, surprised at how you should miss the vocabulary simple like this. Not familiar with the pronunciation makes us difficult to identify the word when it is pronounced. We should know a word by pronunciation the way we know it by spelling, so we could get it with mere pronunciation without text. That's why phonetic symbol counts. We'd better know how it is pronounced to know how it sounds.
2 FIND SHORT AUDIO MATERIAL WITH PERFECT VOICE EXPLAINING HOW HE PRONOUNCES
It helps a lot with our listening comprehension if we get to know how a complete sentence is presented by voice. We miss some of the parts in a sentence since they are alien to the way we think they should be. Especially when it comes to intonation, stress, and liaison. These short materials are suitable for listening over and over again, and your ears will find the syllable used to be difficult to identify an old friend to you.
3 LISTEN TO ENGLISH SONGS WITHOUT LYRICS
You may start with the songs slow in rhythm, clear in voice, simple in vocabulary, then you could try those with a higher speed and complex words, and even raps. The trick is to be without lyrics, and mark down the certain part that fail your understanding, then come back with a lyrics and check if you have them right. Find out the corresponding part in the lyrics which you fail to understand and give it an analysis. Is it because of the speed, the phenomenon of slur or loss of plosion, or accent of non English speaking countries? The more you analyse, the more you get to know the choke point of your listening comprehension, so you could have a clearer direction for future enhancement. One more tip on it, you may listen in a dark and quiet room, or with your eyes closed, so you can concentrate well.
4 SHADOW WHAT YOU HEAR WHEN YOU ARE LISTENING TO ENGLISH PROGRAMS IN LOW SPEED
If something is pronounced in the exact same way you pronounce it, it will be easy for you to catch no matter how long the sentence is or how fast it is spoken. So correct and improve the way you pronounce and speak does help. Shadowing the English program when listening is another option to get familiar with English phonetics.
5 LISTEN TO ENGLISH RADIO RANDOMLY WHEN YOU ARE DOING SOMETHING ELSE
Brain soaking is a highly recommended way to improve listening comprehension. You don't have to concentrate on what's on the radio. Just let it pass your ears by as a river. Leave out the meaning and just focus on the pronunciation relaxedly and randomly. Memorizing the sound and pronunciation unconsciously, you may spend little time to identify the same one when you come across it afterwards.
6 WATCH ENGLISH DOCUMENTARY WITHOUT SUBTITLE
Take the subtitle away, so the oral narration or conversation is the only thing you could focus to get to know what the video is about. Never be too anxious following the subtitle keeping flashing across the screen to mind the voice message. Sometimes we think that removing the subtitle is pretty challenging. However, not until we get rid of the text information could we pay 100% attention to the pronunciation and phonetics. Relying on the subtitle too much is another way of killing our potential in listening comprehension.
7 LISTEN TO TED SPEECH AND SAY THE BASIC ELEMENTS OF EACH SENTENCE ALOUD
TED speech is the perfect material for listening improvement since the speed and accent of English varies a lot due to the different speakers from various countries and regions. There are three elements within a sentence, which mainy shows the generous meaning of it, subject, predicate, and object. Catch these elements and you could get the main idea in no seconds. So the effective and swift way to catch the phonetic information of a sentence is to identify the three in seconds.
8 WATCH ENGLISH VIDEOS SHARED BY SOME CYBER CELEBRITIES AND GIVE IT A PAUSE TO FOLLOW EVERY SENTENCE
This is a undated version of shadowing mentioned in item 4. These videos posted by people around the world are with various accent, flexible expression and wide ranging messages, which may get us exposed to various kinds of English instead of mere standard British English or American English.
9 MAKE PHONE CALLS WITH FOREIGNERS AND TAKE A RECORD OF THE CONVERSATION FOR LATER REVIEW
Phone call is the most challenging task compared with any other occasion due to the bad signal, noisy environment, and lack of facial or body language. Cherish every time when you are making a phone call with foreigners and your listening comprehension with improve a lot especially when you are on a bad line.
10 LISTEN TO NEWS IN ENGLISH WITH STATEMENT MADE BY PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD
We have listened to lots of news from BBC, VOA or CNN, since they are the most common and widespread materials available on line. However, you may find that the standard English spoken by the narrator of the news means nothing if you come across the non standard English of Japanese, Iranian, Indian, etc. Therefore, we should consciously expose our ears to the accent of people from non English speaking countries or countries with non standard English as official language.
11 LISTEN TO CONVERSATIONS SELECTED FROM MOVIES AND TV SERIOUS AND GET THE MAIN IDEA WITHOUT WATCHING THE SCREEN
We improve our listening skills for a more smooth daily communication with foreigners, therefore, making conversation as the learning materials may help. Most of us enjoy watching English movies and TV series, and find that it does little help to the progress in English listening, since we focus more on the plot and actors instead of the conversations themselves. So shut down the screen and concentrate on the voice only, and you will be a step closer to improvement on English listening.
12 SAY THE LYRICS IN THE RHYTHM AS THE ENGLISH MUSIC PLAYS
One more way to make English listening more interesting is to shadow the lyrics of a song. The rhyme and sense of rhythm makes it like a poem. And it will be a kind of enjoyment when you read aloud while listening.
13 WATCH COURSES GIVEN IN ENGLISH WITH THE SUBTITLE COVERED
Netease public class is a platform highly recommended. Lessons in various subjects, English spoken in various speeds, pronunciation with various accent, they provide you with an all around practice plan on English listening.
