GuidesLevel A22 min read
How to improve your English listening skills
Listening improves when you catch the main idea and key words instead of trying to understand every word. Material at your level, listening to the same recording again, recognising connected speech, and short daily listening.
English listening improves when you learn to catch the main idea and key words instead of trying to understand every word. Listening several times to short recordings at your level, recognising how words join together in speech, and listening a little every day are the basics of this skill.
Material at your level
Recordings you can understand but that stretch you a little are the most useful. At the start, slow recordings made for learners, short dialogues, and videos about familiar topics work well. A recording you don't understand at all adds very little, however long you listen.
Listening to the same recording again
On the first listen, catch only the topic and who is speaking. On the second, note the key words. On the third, listen while reading the transcript (if there is one) and see what you missed. Finally, listen once more without it; you will notice how much more you hear than the first time.
Recognising connected speech
In speech, words join together and some sounds become weak: “What do you” often sounds like “wadda ya”, “going to” like “gonna”, and “want to” like “wanna”. Knowing these forms helps you recognise in speech the words you already know in writing.
A short exercise
Make a one-week listening plan: every day, listen to a short recording (one or two minutes) using the four steps above. Write down two new expressions you hear each day, and at the end of the week listen to the first day's recording again.
To keep going, see Ten minutes a day of listen and repeat: English listening practice and English pronunciation for Turkish speakers: the 7 most common difficulties.
Frequently asked questions
Why can't I follow fast speech? Often it isn't that you don't know the words, but that you don't recognise how they sound in connected speech; repeating short recordings helps with this.
Does listening with subtitles improve listening? It helps you match sound to spelling, but doing the last listen without subtitles trains your ear on sound alone.
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