HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR ENGLISH LISTENING SKILLS?

HOW TOIMPROVE YOUR ENGLISH LISTENING SKILLS?

Among many skills needed in learning English, listening plays a significant role as the foundation to acquire the language. Not only will great listening skill enable you to improve your pronunciation, but it also helps you with nearly every aspect of English communication. Accordingly, improving your listening skill is fundamental to master English, try these tips:

Practice listening English every day

Improve your English pronunciation

Learning English pronunciation rules will help you improve your listening. When   pronouncing words incorrectly, you will find many difficulties in listening comprehension. However, the words and sentences you have listened are very familiar to you. Understand how native English speakers speak is the golden key to listen English better. Therefore, you should focus on pronunciation, especially stress, rhythm, connected speech and intonation. The easiest and most effective way to learn how to pronounce words correctly is to listen to native-speakers. Besides, you should use dictionaries with accurate phonetic transcription like Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Longman Advanced American Dictionary to learn new words and their pronunciation.

Listening for the main points

Listening for the main ideas help you to understand what the speaker is saying. Before listening, you should read questions and instructions carefully to predict what you are going to hear and focusing on vocabulary in advance. Futhermore, while listening, you need to focus on content words (nouns, main verbs and adjectives) to identify the main ideas. These words are usually stressed and repeated while function words (prepositions, pronouns, etc) are usually unstressed. In addition, note - taking is a powerful aid to help you concentrate and record. A key to take useful notes is to develop a system of symbols and abbreviations. For examples: “=” means "equal", “Fe” is "iron"…etc.         After listening and taking note sfor the first time, I usually raise questions to listen to and link intended information. Based on familiar question words: “who, what, when, where and how” to put related question words, I can easily listen more comprehensively and effectively.

Note-taking is a useful method to listen effectively

Prediction

Learners should develop the predicting strategies based on the conversation context and word stress. One cause leading poor listening is low concentration which makes us difficult to predict and retain the information we need. You will be more interested in predicting topics, speakers, places, key words, and event sequences.

Identifyreliable sources and listen to English every day 

You should choose your suitable reliable listening sources and practice listening everyday. There are good reliable sources online like BBC, CNN, VOA…and personal sources such as CDs or video. Moreover, all you need is to spend 15 minutes per day developing your listening skills, which helps you familiarize with English pronunciation.

Developyour vocabulary 

With the base of large vocabulary, learners can listen to English better. You can build your vocabulary as follows: select a theme to learn vocabulary, use images and sounds to remember the words faster, take a notebook to write down new words and phrases, find other English words with the same root, and definitely review the new vocabulary you have learned constantly. Remember to practice as many words with your friends to build a powerful vocabulary.

In conclusion, to listen English effectively takes a lot patience, dedication, determination as well as effort. To listen better, you should improve your pronunciation, listen to the main ideas, choose reliable sources, practice English listening every day and build a large vocabulary. Nothing is impossible, so what are you waiting for? Start boosting your listening skills today!

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