Speaking is something which we can practice. Before going into an English environment we can go over likely sentences which we may need. This preparation will help us with our confidence as well.
However, preparing for listening is a lot harder. In fact, it is often one of the greatest obstacles for students. The challenges of listening are connected to several different areas.
Try Listening to the Post!
Let’s start by looking at the first stumbling block that students hit. Nerves. This is completely understandable, but also really damaging. When we are nervous we are distracted by the emotion and the associated fear. While our energy and brain are dealing with these they are not concentrating on what is happening around us, including the conversations. This means that we are not listening. As a result, we don’t hear what is being said and then we get more nervous. This becomes a vicious circle of nervousness causing distraction, resulting in not hearing causing more nervousness, and so on until there is only fear.
How do we handle this? We have to learn to control ourselves and that is hard. As we get more competent it gets easier but until that point then it is all about staying calm. I am going to include here a link to something which I found years ago and I have recommended to many students: One minute meditation.
So that is our first problem. The second problem students come across in listening is the speed that native speakers speak. Some will try to slow down, but often this is short-lived and they soon slip back into their natural speed. This is really frustrating for language learners because it means that they are constantly asking for the speaker to repeat themselves or they are having to repeat each phrase in their head to try and break it down and while doing so they end up missing the next sentence. A new and equally painful vicious circle.
How do we solve this one? This one takes time, there is no quick fix. The short answer is practice. The longer answer is the method of practice. A lot of students will practice listening with subtitles. This is a terrible thing to do. It is always easier to read than to listen so we all naturally slip into reading rather than listening. We have to force ourselves to listen and to learn to rely on and trust our ears. Because English is a stressed-timed language it means that a native speaker is constantly giving ‘clues’ as to what they are talking about. This is done by saying the important words louder and longer than the less important words. When you are practising listening you should try finding the nouns, verbs, and any words which seem loud. If you get all of those you can guess everything else. So the way to deal with a native speaker talking to you really quickly is to just train yourself to find the important words and not to get flummoxed by the bits you can’t hear.
(We will talk more about listening in a future post – this is a huge topic and one which we, unlike many other teaching sites will embrace and help you with. Many teaching sites avoid the challenge of listening, but we don’t believe in that because the purpose to learn a language is to communicate and that can’t happen if you can speak but not hear, stay with us and we will get you through this)
That brings us to the third area we are going to review today. Linking. Linking is an area full of rules. I don’t believe that everyone needs to understand all the rules, but I do think that the basics need to be explained because it helps students to understand why listening is so difficult. Also, like sentence stress, often called accent reduction, if you get the basics of it you will realise that the problem is not you or your skill, the problem is how you were taught English. Sadly most people learn a language completely the wrong way, they start with words, often written, and then build up sentences. But we don’t speak in words we speak in sentences so really you should have been taught sentences and then learned to break them down into words – that is how we learn our first language. Parents don’t speak to their babies using only one word at a time. Yes, they may speak in shorter sentences, but they still use sentences and we all learned our first language with the same technique which is used all over the whole, which rather suggests that it may be the correct technique. We are trying to redress this teaching error with our learning methods. The reason why you can’t understand what is being said is that you are expecting to hear words, but in fact, your ears are receiving a long stream of connected sounds with no clear beginning or end to the words.
So the areas which frequently throw students are fear, not listening for the stresses in sentences, and finally, not training our ears to hear words stuck together. None of these are insurmountable, but they are difficult. You must remember that just by getting to this site and this level you have already overcome much harder obstacles and once we have trained you through some of these areas you will also master them. Overcoming the challenges of listening is about understanding rather than memorizing or any of the much harder areas you have already trudged successfully through.