The One Exercise You Need To Master Listening

It is that simple.

Photo by Dollar Gill on Unsplash

So you’re trying everything. You listen to countless podcasts on your way to and back from work. You binge-watch TV series. You trudge to decipher what your favorite vocalist is singing.

You’re seamlessly following a sentence along and then… boom! You are lost. First you trip on a syllable, then you miss a word, and then the entire sentence isn’t just making sense any more. Soon enough, you find yourself guessing at the meaning, instead of just absorbing it.

Your grammar knowledge is solid and you’re developing a strong vocabulary, but when it comes to the dreaded listening, it feels like you are at a standstill, and any advancements come at a hard-earned, snail’s pace.

I’ve been a language tutor for over a decade now (no need to call me old!), and regardless of the language I was teaching, I soon started to notice that the difficulties my students lamented often boiled down to one key factor.

Granted, every student voices their struggles in their own unique way. However, when it came to listening, they invariably reported hearing a wall of text, without being able to break it down into words and make sense of it.

Being tsunami’d by a wall of text! If that isn’t overwhelming, I don’t know what is.

I racked my brains trying to come up with a solution, and after months of trial and error, here’s the exercise that did the trick.

Dictation.

Yup, that’s right.

You might find yourself reminiscing about elementary school memories, or you may be chuckling at it as an activity for children.

While this may be true, dictation isn’t just for children: it is an activity employed for language learning and testing.

For those who are unfamiliar with it, dictation is the practice of writing down what you hear from a given oral text–whether that is a teacher reading, the lyrics of a song, an audio record, a YouTube video.

Don’t be fooled by its simplicity: albeit a simple exercise, dictation packs a punch in jumpstarting more language competencies than one. It’s a cross-cutting tool that targets phonetic knowledge and touches on spelling and grammar as well.

Still not convinced? Let’s give it a go.

Step #1. Be selective of the oral text

While there’s a wealth of resources out there, you may want to stick to your current level at first.

Initially, you may choose sources from any online listening activity, really. There are also plenty of options on YouTube. Feel free to explore listening options on official learning websites or language learning apps.

Then, once you feel confident, consider upgrading your resources to higher-level materials. And if you’re feeling adventurous, explore content that isn’t specifically designed for language learning.

Instead of devoting all of your self-study time to the usual grammar consolidation format, how about you grab a cup of coffee and spell out the lines from that hilarious misunderstanding from How I Met Your Mother? Or that poignant political monologue from Game of Thrones? Or that witty, biting exchange from The Crown?

Language is everywhere, so the sky’s the limit!

Step #2. Grab a blank sheet and a pen

… if you’re an old soul like yours truly, that is. Otherwise, you are very much free to do this on a Word Document, or any tablet of your preference.

Step #3. Listen once (if you’re not familiar with the text)

Hold off the writing: for now, just immerse yourself in the language. Sip your tea or coffee and enjoy the phonetic beauty of the language you’re learning.

If you happen to catch some words or bits of sentences here and there, that’s great! You’re nailing your warm-up.

And most importantly (I will never, ever stress this enough!), do not panic if you don’t understand everything! In fact, if you’ve chosen your text well, you should be able to grasp roughly 60–70% of the content. The remaining percentage is what you’ll take home for the day.

Step #4: Listen, pause, write

Here’s the deal: the ultimate goal of this activity is not to transcribe the entirety of the text, but to capture as much of it as you can. As soon as you feel there’s nothing more you can get out of the text, it’s time to wrap things up and move on to the next step.

Here are some standard procedures I follow–with my students in the classroom, anyhow. However, feel free to adapt them to your preferences and experiment. As you become a more skilled listener, you’ll find your groove.

• How to break down the text
  I usually press play, then stop after a sentence or two (I don’t make it too long), then allow for three re-listens before proceeding to another sentence. Feel free to experiment with the placement of pauses needed until you find a rhythm that works for you.
• How many times to listen to the text
  Beyond the initial full listening and the three re-listens per sentence, I typically recommend an overall final listen. (More on that on Step #8). This averages out to five listens total, which should be more than enough for you to get enough practice.
• Why leaving blanks is important
  Chances are you won’t probably catch everything that is being said. Whenever you come across a segment you cannot fully decipher, simply leave a blank or write down a line.

During your initial practice sessions, you may use a generic line for any unclear segments.

As your listening skills improve, you’ll become more skilled at making educated guesses about the number of words or syllables you’re missing. In these cases, jot down as many lines as you believe there are syllables.

It should look like this: Please feel free to _ _ should _ _ any questions.

Why?

Because even in moments of silence, your brain is actively reconstructing the speech, and the more elements you feed it, the better.

Step #5: Regularly check for grammar and spelling mistakes

You might be forgetting a plural or third person suffix, which will have consequences on the form of adjacent verbs and the meaning of the words in context.

These details are extremely important: they can be all hints about how to fill in those missing blanks.

Why choose to do this on your own instead of just keeping listening until you figure out the entire text or comparing with the transcript?

Because you need to actively engage with the text, enhance your skills, and work from the bottom up to reconstruct what the speaker(s) is or are saying. This will greatly reinforce your intuition about the language you’re studying.

Ask yourself: Are you sure that is how you spell that word? Does that sentence make grammatical sense? Could there be a contracted auxiliary after the subject?

Step #6: Try and fill the blanks

At this point you have listened to the text around three or four times, and you may be looking at a text that has some words you feel sure of, and some blanks scattered here and there.

This is the moment to stop listening, focus on those blanks and guess at what they could be.

Daunting as that sounds, you’re not starting out from scratch: you have some bits of the text (context is always your best friend!), you have your grammatical knowledge and language intuition, and most of all, you have sounds.

Here’s an actual example from one of my recent classes. (General English, Pre-Intermediate students.)

We start with L+ ___ ____N + ____.

You’re fairly positive that you’re hearing an L, an open ‘O’, an N, a G, and an ‘E’. Great! Let’s start by figuring out the open ‘O’. What are the letters we use to represent the open ‘O’ in English? Can’t think of any? Fair enough, can you think of words that have the same sound? Fantastic! How do we spell them? With ‘AU’, you’ve got it!

So we’ve got L + AU + _____ N + ____.

What is the context of speaking? What is the couple discussing? Housework, that’s right! How is the conversation playing out? If the lady has asked her boyfriend if has washed the sheets and the clothes. Fantastic! So let’s think of a word that fits. Hum the word to yourself even if it doesn’t make any sense to you.

At this point, you either know “laundry” or don’t. If you don’t, you’ll have learnt a new word, with a particular focus on its pronunciation.

I assure you, you’re gonna fill in at least a small percentage of those blanks.

Step #7: Check the Script

When you feel you’ve squeezed every drop of understanding from the text, go ahead and fill in the remaining blanks with the script. Some words may be new discoveries, while others might make you go “ahhh, so that was it!”.

Step #8: Listen one last time

Now that the hard part is over, take a moment to do your stretching by listening to the text and reading along what they’re saying.

Time to deliver the final blow to those previously unknown words and interiorize them–in meaning and sound!

Chances are, next time you hear them, you’ll understand them naturally.

Step #9: Practice regularly

You probably saw this coming, right?

Results take time and dedication. If you’re genuinely committed, I’d say you can reasonably expect to notice a difference in your listening skills in about four to six months, give or take. It may even happen sooner, provided you’re willing to invest the only resources that yield significant results: time and consistency.

Conclusion: elevating your listening skills

Don’t forget, listening is an especially challenging skill to master, regardless of the language you’re learning, so don’t beat yourself up if you’re struggling.

It is not uncommon to notice a gap between a student’s proficiency in grammar, vocabulary, and speaking, compared to their comprehension of an oral text.

Listening requires special care and extra attention, especially for learners in their self-study time. In fact, I often advise sacrificing some of the time typically dedicated to grammar consolidation to address those listening difficulties instead.

There is a wide range of activities that you can (and should!) incorporate in your self-study sessions to achieve listening expertise. Dictation is by no means the only exercise to help you ace your Listening game, but it stands out as a powerhouse among them.

Here’s why:

• You will be training to break down that infamous wall of text into individual words.
• You will start detecting patterns of associations between sounds and their graphic representation.
• Because you’ll be listening for detail, it enhances your listening accuracy.
• It acts as a valuable consolidation of spelling rules and as a review of syntactic structures and vocabulary.
• Last, but most definitely not least, it fosters your phonetic sixth sense.

Nope, not that sixth sense. I mean the linguistic sixth sense.

Despite our dedication (despite our talent), we might never reach a level where we effortlessly absorb any spoken content without intermediate stages of decoding. Even advanced speakers may on occasion encounter uncertainties.

Yet, as proficiency grows, uncertainties no longer lead to standstills but become mere inconveniences easily dismissed in a split second. This happens because our intuition has been trained to reconstruct spoken content, building on the extensive phonetic competences it has acquired over time–your sixth sense at work.

Whether you call it prediction, intuition, sixth sense–by all means work on it, cultivate it, and the dividends will be paid back in your enhanced listening abilities.