How to Improve Your English Listening Skill?

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How to Improve Your English Listening Skill?

To improve your listening comprehension, you can pay attention to the following tips:

 

  1. First of all, put yourself in a newborn baby’s shoes. As the baby should listen a lot before speaking, you, too, should practice listening for a long time. Don’t expect to become perfect at listening in a short period of time, as it also takes the baby quite a long time to be able to start speaking. In other words, you should be patient and hard-working.
  2. Start listening to short conversations in English with simpler words and phrases. As you become more skilled, increase the length of the conversations and the difficulty level of the words and phrases. (You may also like to attend lectures, conferences, etc. where more formal and academic words and phrases are used.)  
  3. Practice listening regularly and make it one of your habits. We have two ears and one tongue. It means that we should listen twice as much as we speak. 
  4. Try to guess what the text is trying to say. In so doing, you will become an active listener. Sometimes, you need to put yourself in the speaker’s shoes so that the message gets across more easily.
  5. Little by little, when you find yourself ready to speak, form some friendly groups among your friends and make conversations in English on topics that you like. You may also like to play some roles with your friends. Try not to use your first language in your conversations neither to make yourself understood to your friends nor to understand them.
  6. In early stages, listen to texts you enjoy more or have some information about. In this case, you can listen for a longer period of time with less fatigue.
  7. Listen to a variety of texts, including news, films, songs, documentaries, monologues, dialogues, etc. in different styles (formal and informal). As a result, you can communicate much better in real-life situations.  
  8. In face-to-face conversations, pay special attention to non-verbal communication forms as well, such as body language, eye-contact, etc. Remember that “The eyes of man can speak as much as his tongue”.  
  9. Don’t worry if you don’t know some words or phrases. Consider the text as a whole and stick to the meaning. In other words, you are supposed to be ‘tolerant of ambiguity’.
  10. Regularly consult an appropriate talking dictionary with phonetic symbols, such as Oxford, Longman, Cambridge, etc., which transcribe words, phrases and possibly sentences.

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