5 strategies (tips) to improve your English Listening Skills

1. Mindset

The way you think makes a huge difference in you abilities to take action or to understand what you are hearing. So if you go into a situation with a negative mindset, I am sure that you will not do as well and you will not feel as confident. If you go into a situation with the positive mindset, “yes, I can do it. I am able to understand what I hear in English, I do have the skills and I have the motivation to improve my skills. I see myself improving every day”.  These are the kinds of phrases, these are the kinds of ideas that I want for you to have in you mind as you approach situations in English where you want to understand what you hear.

So my first step is to start with the positive mindset. I believe you can do it. You can understand what you hear in English. And I’m here to help you so that you can even improve even more and build your confidence, so that you can interact with success in any English speaking conversation.

2. Listen, read and speak

When you listen, it is very helpful if you can use other activities to develop you listening skills. I would compare this to cross-traing for a sport. Lets say you want to be really good at soccer. Alright, in the rest of the world football, but in the US people say SOCCER, so you might play a lot of soccer to get good at soccer. Of course, that’s obvious right. But some people will encourage you to cross-train. Maybe try a different sport that will increase your endurance, or your breathing, your lung capacity. Maybe you want to try swimming. It’s a totally different sport, but it should help your overall physical capabilities. 

So I recommend finding materials where you can listen and read them. Any videos that you can listen to, and you can read the subtitles. You can start by listening only. Don’t read the subtitles.  And the second time that you watch the video you can listen and read. So pay attention to the subtitles. Other materials you could use include any podcast in English. You could use of the Voice of America news. They often have listening and reading that you can do together. The third is SPEAK. So what I want you to try is to first listen, then listen and read. Then try a speaking teachnique that is called shadowing. In other words, what you do is you listen and as soon as you can possibly repeat what you hear, I want you to say it. So you are going to be mimicking what you hear as fast as you can right after you hear it. So in these three ways you are going to develop your listening skills, because reading will help you identify the connection between  what you hear and what you read. And SPEAKING, if you can say a sound you will be able to hear it better. I hope that make sense and trust me that this kind of cross-training will really help your listening skills.

3. Diversity

I encourage you to listening to a diverse set of materials. Try some listening materials that are short, 2 or 3 or 5 minutes and then as you advance, try materials that are longer - 20 or 30 minutes or even a full movie of an hour or two. So a diversity of length of materials and shorter-length materials are better for repeating over and over. If you have a three-minute video you could repeat that 5 times and you have still only studied for 15 minutes. So it's very easy to do.

Another point about diversity is that I encourage you to begin listening to materials that are interesting to you, that fit within your interests. So if you are interested in soccer, listen to materials about soccer or listening to an actual soccer game with English sport casters or announcers. But I want you to push yourself to go outside of your interests and listen to a diverse range of materials. If you are an artist, I want you to find science materials to listen to. You could listening to the NPR radio, that's the National Public Radio. Or the BBC radio. You are going to find topics on science, technology, business, health, all different kinds of topics that you can explore to listen to a diverse range of materials. WHY SHOULD YOU DO THIS? Because of vocabulary. I want you to be familiar with a wide range of vocabulary.

So again, begin with topics that motivate you, that you are really interested in. But when you are ready for a challenge, try materials that you wouldn't naturally be drawn to. Maybe something in the different fields or different topic than you would usually choose. Now that will keep things fresh that you challenge you.

4. Guess first

Why would you guess first? We want to be sure. We want to have concrete, 100% confidence in what we are hearing, right? I want you to guess what you think you are going to hear based on the situation or the material that you expect. This activates your brain and you start thinking about vocabulary that you can expect and that way that vocabulary is fresh in you mind and your brain does not work so hard to dig it up. So before you enter conversation at a specific event or a specific place with a certain person, you should guess what do you think that person might want to talk about. That will help you to be prepared mentally for that conversation or for the material. 

5. Understand big the ideas

What I mean by this is I want to help you to understand what is special about structure of English and the way that we speak. What are the patterns? If we can start to identify the patterns of English, then when you want to understand a specific conversation, a specific phrase or a specific word, you are going to be able to place that within the framework or the structure of English. And you will be able to organize thesenew learning much more easily. You will have a place to put all the new ideas, the new vocabulary and the new phrases. 

So the first thing I want you to think about is the big picture, or the framework of English. What I mean is we have to get used to things like the rhythm of English, how we chunk the phrases together. And sometimes it has nothing to do with punctuation like period or commas, although sometimes it does. We have to get used to the stress that we put on a certain part of the phrase. The stress that we put on certain syllables in a word. We have to get used to how in English we have key content words and we have weaker a function words. We also have to get used to the sounds that we are going to hear within the words that maybe you do not have in your native language like the "TH" sound or the "R", .. I know in other languages these may not exist. 

So this is what I call getting used to the big picture, understanding the big picture. So you have a framework understand how English is special. And when you learn new ideas or new words you can organize all of these things on your brain. And when we organize, it helps us to remember. 

These above are five secrets for listening success. And I hope you find it helpful