Lida R. Baker - Fifty Ways to Practice Listening: Tips for ESL/EFL Students

I t takes many hours to become proficient at anythinga sport, a hobby, a musical instrument, or a foreign language. Many thousands of hours, in fact! For a student of English, this can seem difficult to accomplish, especially if your only opportunity to study English is in the classroom.

This book will help you practice listening in English, both inside and outside the classroom. If you are already taking English classes, some of the tips will help you get more out of your classes. If youre not taking English classesand even if you areother tips will give you ideas to try on your own. Not every idea will work for every student. Thats why there are fifty. We feel sure that many of the ideas presented here will bring you results if you try them sincerely.

Here is a suggested method for using this book:

1. Read through all of the fifty tips without stopping.
2. Read through the tips again. Choose five or six that you think might work for you. Decide when you will try them, and for how long.
3. Try to choose different types of ideas: some that you can use in the classroom, some that you can use on your own. You can choose some ideas that require going online or using media, and some that dont. Also, choose some that you can practice with a friend or language learning partner, and some that you can do alone. For your convenience, the tips are divided by category, such as strategies, games, radio, music, etc.
4. Each time you use one of the ways, make a note about how well it worked for you and why. Remember that most of the tips will work best if you practice them several times (or even make them a habit). Dont try a tip only once and decide its no good for you. Give the tips you try a few chances, at least.
5. Every few weeks, read through the tips again, and choose some new ones. Discontinue using any methods that are not working for you.

The most important advice, though, is to actually do the suggestions you read about here. Wishing is not working. If you dont do the work, you wont see the results.

Finally, consider trying some of the other books in our Fifty Ways to Practice series. No one skill in English is really separate from the others. Speaking, listening, reading, writing, vocabulary, and grammar are all connected. Improving in one area will almost always bring improvements to other areas too.

. Be an active listener . Make a conscious effort to hear and understand what other people are saying. To focus your listening, ask yourself questions like these: What did he say? What was that word? What does ___ mean? Why did she say ___? If you cant follow a conversation easily, stop and ask for help: Could you say that again? Sorry, I didnt catch that. Could you tell me what () means?

. Keep a journal of your listening experiences. Write the name of the listening source (radio show, TV show, conversation, etc.), the date, the time you spent listening, a short summary of what you heard, and your feelings, questions, or responses to what you heard. This will help you see if you are practicing enough to make progress.

. Practice listening every day . Just as you make time to exercise or practice a musical instrument every day, set aside time for listening in English each day. It can be as little as ten or fifteen minutes. You can listen to anything you choose. The goal is to do nothing in this time except listen. At the end of your practice session, write about it in your listening journal.

. Look for visual clues to help you understand what a speaker is saying. For example, look at the speakers face. How does he/she look serious, happy, angry? If you are listening with a group of people, look at their faces too. Notice how they respond to the speaker.

. Practice listening for stressed words. Stressed words are spoken louder, at a higher pitch, and more clearly than other words in the sentence. Important words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) are normally stressed in English. If you listen for the stressed words in a sentence, you can usually get the main idea. Dont worry if you miss a few articles and prepositions.

. Listen for the intonation .Intonation is the way a speakers voice rises or falls. At the end of a sentence, rising intonation means the speaker is asking a yes/no question. (For example, Are you hungry?) Falling intonation at the end signals the end of a sentence (Im going home now.) or a wh-question (What time is the movie?).

. Listen carefully to the ends of words. The s, ing, and ed endings tell you about the tense of verbs and the number of nouns and speakers.

. Practice listening between the lines. This means listening not just to a speakers words but to the speakers deeper meaning or feelings. To understand this deeper level of meaning, ask these questions: What did the speaker say? What did he mean? Was there a difference between the simple meaning of the words and the speakers intended meaning? What feeling or message was the speaker trying to convey? Use tone of voice and body language for additional clues.

. Tune out distractions while you are listening. Sometimes people mentally plan their own response when another person is talking, and they miss some of the speakers message. Force yourself you listen fully when someone is talking.

. Practice making predictions . Listen to a story or a scene from a movie. Listen for five minutes; then pause the recording. Predict what will happen next. Then restart the recording and see if your prediction was correct. This kind of anticipation skill will help you listen to longer speeches and lectures.