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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Language level

B1 Intermediate

For enhancing my listening skills, I listen to the podcasts of the series of your website. That is especially very diverse and includes a few sections that practical for me. At the end of each episode, Tom learns some grammatical tips.

I try to take a lot of tips for my clever English teacher. He Believes he is the King of England

What I do to help with listening is: to practise my English listening skill here every day.

I can understand what the expert teacher said, but I can't make the person whom I talk with understood what I want to ask so many times when I can't catch up with conversation.

The presenter summarises very clear my trouble and of the majority of people. For me too, Listening is by far the most difficult of the four skill to develop. I also ask people I communicate with to they repeat, but I don't understand even when they repeat it. And, if I apply the second strategy which was mentioned through make smaller questions, but I don’t succeed in understanding much. What should I do?, what other recomendations should I follow?. Thanks a lot for your support and I look forward to read their comments once again.

Hello César Árraga

Different things work better for different people, and it's difficult to give you specific advice without knowing you, but in general I would recommend extensive listening, i.e. listening to English as often as you can. Television programmes and films can be great resources here, because what you see also helps you understand. It also provides meaningful context. I would recommend watching them with English subtitles at first, and then later without them.

When there are phrases or sentences in the film or episode that you think could be useful to learn, write them down and then practise saying them. Listening can improve pronunciation, but practising your pronunciation can also help your listening!

I hope this helps you.

All the best

Kirk

The LearnEnglish Team

Listening seems one of the most difficult skills specially when the person who is talking talks very quickly so we should all have some strategies in order to improve our listening skills in order to understand what we hear. For me, being upset by not understanding someone who is talking requires unfortunately to ask him to repeat once again what he had said slowly to understand well what he wants to say. When talking with records or movies, we can stop playing them to listen another time to the part we didn’t understand. All of these strategies are for me excellent ones in order to improve someone’s listening skills to achieve better level in someone’s listening skills.

I improve listening English with videos and movies, also I hear radio station from UK like sunshine radio or absolute radio classic rock, also I like hear bbc radio station.