An interview about listening skills

Listen to the English teacher talk about listening to practise and improve your listening skills.

Do the preparation task first. Then listen to the audio and do the exercises.

Preparation

Transcript

Presenter: So, today's expert teacher is Gabriella, a university English teacher from Leeds. Gabriella, hi and thanks for joining us today.

Gabriella: Thanks for having me!

Presenter: So, I have to confess today's topic is something I am really bad at: listening. Most people say speaking is the most stressful part of learning a new language but, for me, with my B1 German, speaking isn't so bad. At least I'm in control of it. But listening … woah … people speak so fast and it's like my brain just shuts down. Am I just really strange and bad at listening? Tell me, honestly, I can take it.

Gabriella: No, you're not strange. In fact, it's really common. You know, in exams most people do pretty well in speaking compared with listening. Of course, exams are a different situation from real life because in an exam you can't ask for something to be repeated or explained. You usually have just one or maybe two opportunities to listen to the dialogue and then it's gone.

Presenter: Right, but in real life I feel stupid always saying, 'Sorry, can you repeat that, please?', especially if I still don't understand even when they repeat it. And people out there listening, I hope you don't do this – quite often the person just repeats what they said equally as fast and I'm still lost!

Gabriella: They do, don't they? In real life, you've got two strategies. One is to pretend to understand and get out of the conversation as fast as you can.

Presenter: Yep, sounds familiar!

Gabriella: But, obviously that's not going to help if it's a conversation with high stakes. It might have important consequences. I mean, if you're just chatting with a stranger at the bus stop, it doesn't matter. But imagine you're at a government office or a bank, trying to find out what paperwork you need to get your ID or open a bank account. What can you do then?

Presenter: I hope you've got the answer, Gabriella, because I'm coming out in a cold sweat just thinking about either of those situations!

Gabriella: The other strategy is to summarise what they said.

Presenter: But how can you do that if you didn't understand what they said?

Gabriella: Ah, well, you only start the summary, so you might say, in German in your case, 'OK, so the first thing I have to do is …?' and make it a question. Or, for example, 'And which office is that again?' Break it down into smaller questions and the other person will naturally start answering them. That way you're controlling the conversation a bit more.

Presenter: I get you ...

Task 1

TrueOrFalse_MjMzNjg=.xml

Task 2

Matching_MjMzNjk=.xml

Discussion

What do you do to help with listening?

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Worksheet79.35 KB

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Language level

B1 Intermediate

If you would like to practice speaking, we can do it on Zoom?

Hi bariss,

Unfortunately, sharing Zoom and other personal contact details is not allowed in our House Rules. But you can practise conversation by writing comments and replies here on this site :)

Best wishes,

Jonathan

The LearnEnglish Team

A couple years ago I had a listening test. It was a complete failure for several reasons. Firstly, I was placed far from the speaker, so I could barely hear him. Secondly, I wasn´t used to his accent, it sounded weird for me. And finally, in my opinion he spoke so fast. So you already can imagine the results. Nowadays, in order to improve this skill, I am doing these tasks from this website and I am also watching series in English with English subtitles. I think I am making progress bit by bit, the key here is to be constant.

My problem is understand some people when they speak, some of them speak weird or is difficult is like here in Mexico, the people who live near to the beaches. They cut de words, their spanish is no full, they cut the word S at the end, In Mexico we understand them because We get used to hear them. Maybe this is the reason because some words I can not undestand in englihs, the diction

Yes, I have to confess that the listening skill of the exam is difficult for me. I like to exercise a lot of listening tasks in English, but sometimes if the conversation is going to run fast, I feel that I am still lost and will try to listen to audio records once again. Many texts seem to be simple for listening but when you start to listen to them, you want to get out of it, otherwise, you will come out in a cold sweat of your body. To avoid these issues, I have been using a wide range of listening entertainment such as TV, Radio, and Music. I can get it while speaking on the TV even it would be faster than the exam. But, I can get a conversation on TV. It could be an unbelievable circumstance But I am honestly getting the speaker of TV.

Hello Ugulhan,

It's great that you're using lots of different resources to improve your listening skills, and this is definitely the best approach overall.

Listening tasks on exams are often more difficult to understand than speaking in television and films because video gives you a lot of information that audio alone does not.

Best wishes,

Kirk

The LearnEnglish Team

The listening section is so tricky, in some cases It could be easy or difficult depends on what kind of the topic and vocabulary they use. I did not find anything hard from the accent but for vocabulary, I can not escape from any strange vocabulary. If we want to increase our listening score It could be better if we practiced by reading too.

i think to improve your listening skill you need to listen to podcasts tv shows practice hard and stuff like this

Listening for people who didn't birth in a country where don´t speak English is very difficult to understand very well some records because the level about it, is different in each one. So my strategy consist of listeneing once without taking notes, and twice listening again but taking notes. If I find out some unknow words, I search it the meaning, and then listened again but following the lecture to try to accustom to the sounds of words.

For me has been a challenge too, I need to give more time in this area, I work on my listen with podcast and songs, but some songs are too fast or use a particular way to pronounce the words, grammar also is a challenge. There are a lot of things to study, thousands of words, grammar, listening, writing, but it's not impossible. It's just hard work and persistence and on the other hand english is an awesome language.