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

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That is correctly hard situation. I am mentioning that listening need to pay attention as soon as you can best. Otherwise you won't achieve your daily goals. I think the best way to improve your listening skills is to join social networking and events. For example the theater is a good solution. While you are listening, you should catch the verbs. And rest of sentences you can pretend easily. For this purpose you must learn all of the verbs.

I have the same problems as the interviewer. I have been so upset not to understand people's conversation. I listen to BBC radios and watch English film as much as I can. Wish I will know everything in English one day!

Listen to audios and watch videos

I think if I practice and talk a lot, with diferentes peoples or natives, maybe i will get to undertand and learn diferentes acents, but some people speak very speed, I try to watch videos on youtube, take difentes videos like ellen Degenres, I listened some people really learn earing this videos, whatever i goin to try and I invit someone who want to practice with me

I definitely agree with the second technique, summarising the dialogue.Catching the key messages helps me to understand more even someone says fast.I think we can more easily translate their words with the right definition if we're familiar with their accents.

Sometimes I listen to music or watch movies from different anglo-countries because has multiple accents and vocabularies that I have to understand.

Listening is dificult also because of the diferent accent.

I'm suffering from listening skills, but I have many months practice listening to BBC radio and lyrics, i feel good progress, of course I take the advice from this audio and other experiences in comments to be excellent in listening skills. Thanks.

I think listening part when I learning English is the most difficult part. Of course because everybody who talk to me using English was a rapper

I think to learn English need to comprehensively, so I didn't particularly improve the listening part, but change some behavior is really useful like I will watch English TV and listen podcast replace to music, this tiny changing bring benefits to me and I feel my English have tremendously improved.