Four-step English listening practice method

With four listening practice steps, you will grasp your weaknesses to have a basis to improve your English, gradually increasing your communication skills.

Before you start this method, you should choose the listening material that is suitable for you. In other words, the listening should not be too fast, have too many difficult words, and the topic should not be too complicated.

Once you have the right materials, you can start practicing by listening in four steps as follows.

First, you turn on the tape (or video), listen to the entire tape or speech. While listening, you just need to focus on clarifying the questions: what is the topic about, how many main ideas, sub-ideas, examples...

Most English learners cannot communicate because they lack listening skills. Illustration: Silicon Valley Globe

Note, you do not stop the tape and listen to each sentence again at this step. Just let the tape run from beginning to end and try to grasp the most important ideas of the listening. If you listen about 10-20 times and still cannot grasp the main idea, it means that the listening is beyond your ability, so choose an easier listening.

After listening and understanding the main idea of ​​the lesson, you move on to step two: "note-taking". Prepare a piece of paper and a pen, play the tape again and "note" what you understand. Note, like step one, you do not stop the tape and listen to each sentence, but play it from beginning to end and "take notes".

In step one, you already understand the basic content of the speech, so "taking notes" is mainly to systematize the content of the speech. Because the speaking speed is always faster than the writing speed, you only "take notes" of the most basic content, not write down everything you hear. To make it easier to understand, imagine your boss is assigning a task, you have a piece of paper and a pen, write down the task - do not write down the boss's words.

You can listen two or three times to fully "take notes" of the content and move on to the third step, dictation. The purpose of dictation is to test your vocabulary, grammar and detailed listening ability.

When you take dictation, you simply stop after each paragraph, or each sentence, and try to write down exactly what the speaker said in the text. Pay attention to each word ending in "s" or "ed", and try to do it as perfectly as possible. Many times, you may feel like you don't know which word this is, so skip it and continue until you have transcribed your listening completely.

Dictation will help you recognize your pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary... mistakes. My personal experience is that most students with poor grammar will show many mistakes in this part, for example, confusing "a", "the", "in", "on" or missing "es", "ed". Those with poor English pronunciation will have difficulty grasping "keywords" - important words in the speech. Those who listen well, pronounce well and have a good grammar will catch everything.

The final step is to listen and review. You need a transcript of the speech to complete this final listening step. Read the transcript of the speech and compare it with your own dictation to find out why you heard it wrong or didn't hear it. This is very important for you to recognize your listening weaknesses: is it due to lack of vocabulary, poor pronunciation, or poor grammar? Once you know your weaknesses, you have a basis for focusing on studying to improve your English ability.

Then you can play the audio over and over again, and practice listening every day. The more you listen, the more you will improve your listening comprehension and English communication skills.

According to VNE