Living in the UK: Learning English Part 3: On Listening Well for Advanced Learners

Last time we shared with you some resources and methods to practise English listening as someone who has just started to learn English. Today we will continue with the sharing for the more advanced English learners among us, and talk about how to practise our listening skills, and introduce some strategies and free resources! Let’s go!

For Intermediate and Advanced Learners: Targeted Exercises 

After learning English through apps and familiarising ourselves with English sounds, we can move onto specific resources and focus on our different language needs: 

1. Listening Exercises with Quizzes: 

If we want to work on catching key information in conversations, what is better than to work with listening exercises that come with quizzes (and answers)? Through listening exercises like these we can check how much we can comprehend in conversations through the quiz results. But as we listen to different exercises we can get a feeling of what information in a conversation people might deem as essential (usually the ‘whats’, ‘whens’, ‘wheres’, ‘whos’, ‘hows’ and ‘whys’), and at which point the speakers might begin to offer important information which we should take note of. 

• Cambridge English Language Assessment: Learning English: Listening offering exercises from the basic (beginner) level to advanced level. You can listen to the audio at the beginning of the exercise, then move onto answering the questions without listening to the audio again. In this way, you can check how much you heard and remembered in the first round were really the important information that you should be focusing on. 

• British Council: LearnEnglish Teens: Listening (starting from A1): how to navigate school life, social life and travel around with ease? These listening exercises (including transcripts, quizzes, vocabularies) for teenage students offer listening materials relevant to teenage life context. 

• British Council: LearnEnglish: Listening (starting from A1): similar to LearnEnglish Teens, except with contents more relevant to the adult world, like the workplace, appointments and work assignments, etc. These exercises also contain different tasks, transcripts and worksheets through which you can see how much you are comprehending, and learn new vocabularies. 

2. Listen as much as possible!

Apart from the listening exercises and the apps and channels dedicated to English learning, we can use any material we come across to help us improve our English listening skills. In fact, these materials are often better learning resources than materials designed and produced for English learning, for they usually more accurately reflect how English is being spoken in everyday contexts. 

So, what kind of resources can we use, and how?

• Practise catching key information: TEDTalk videos are often published with subtitles. And the speakers usually take great care to articulate well. We can switch off the subtitles, listen to the talks (or parts of it), drop down the key points, then switch on the subtitles and watch the video again to check how much key information we are getting (or not getting). 

• Learn more vocabularies: documentaries, radio programmes, podcasts (like those available on BBC Sounds) and audiobooks offer listening materials rich in information and with clear pronunciations. You can choose the materials according to the subjects you want to catch up on, like politics and current affairs, history, films, hot debate topics, popular shows, campus life, etc. to enrich your vocabulary. 
  After a while, you can even speed up the audio playback to 1.25 times of its original speed, as people’s talking speed in real life can be slightly quicker than that of a broadcaster’s speaking speed.

• Understanding slang and accents: dramas on streaming platforms and movies (which you can borrow for free from your local libraries) are usually subtitled, and their use of language and accents tends to be more informal and reflects everyday conversations than radio programmes and documentaries. Regional radio programmes are also a great source at learning regional accents. 

• Meaningful background noises: sometimes learning can occur passively when we let the sound of people speaking English float by, without trying to understand it. We might not catch the meaning, but we will be surely capturing the accents or rhythms of terms and phrases. So, tune your radio to a local station and keep it on while doing chores to familiarise yourself with English sounds and pronunciations effortlessly! 

3. Chat a lot!

All of the above resources and materials are good learning aids, but nothing beats chatting with local friends. As listening is about familiarising yourself with English and being able to understand and respond promptly, conversing in English is the one true way to learn to listen well. You can learn to understand their accents, ask them to clarify terms when you encounter new vocabulary and slang, and learn how to place these different elements in the local cultural contexts 

Find out which church in your neighbourhood is offering conversation cafes and/or English classes here! And make friends and connect with people in your neighbourhood. 

4. Sleep well and relax

No matter how good (or bad) we feel like we are at listening and understanding English, when we are listening in another language, our mind usually goes through the complicated process of receiving, translating and interpreting - all within a split second! If this listening happens in the middle of a conversation, then it usually follows with finding the right words in another language to formulate a response while still listening to the other speaker. So sometimes, if we feel tired or anxious or stressed, we may find ourselves missing more details in conversations than usual. And there is only one remedy to this: sleep well before important appointments when you know you need to listen well, and try your best to relax! 

Tips: Helpful phrases and moves!

Not catching what the other was saying? Don’t worry! You are not alone in this. Here are some phrases we can use to ask people to repeat what they said, or explain what they meant:

• I beg your pardon?

• Excuse me, could you repeat that (slowly) please?

• Would you mind saying that again?

• What does that (word) mean?

In situations when we need to be sure that we are getting the correct information, like when you are calling your GP or the HMRC, we can repeat what we heard:

• Speaker: “You can call 12345 678910 for further information.”

• Me: “May I check with you to see if I got the right number? Is it 12345 678910?”

You can also repeat the information in your own words, then ask the speaker “do I understand this correctly?”. In this way, there will be a smaller chance for us to mishear or misunderstand any important information! 

Can you think of any other fun and free ways to practise English? Let us know! In the next issue, we will introduce resources and tips practising reading and writing. Stay tuned for more fun activities and resources we can improve our English competency with!