Listening is another way besides Reading to gain more knowledge and widen our vocabulary bank. In this article, we not only share a strategy to help students improve their Listening skills but also how to learn new words, collocations, and idioms through Listening.
If English learners want to take English proficiency tests in the future, kindly notice that almost English proficiency tests evaluate test-takers' skills based on Reading, Listening, Writing, and Speaking. However, the Duolingo English Test evaluates test-takers' skills based on Literacy, Comprehension, Conversation, and Production. In detail, your Listening skill contributes scores to Comprehension and Conversation, or if you want to improve your Comprehension and Conversation sub-scores, let’s improve your Listening skill.
Let’s get yourself ready and explore this unique strategy.
If you are looking for strategy to practice and improve your Reading, explore here.
Step 1: Choose suitable content
Finding suitable Listening content to listen to is the first step. If students pick difficult content than their current levels, it's easy to lose motivation, far less learning for improvement. In the Standard CEFR, we have A1 - A2 - B1 - B2 - C1 - C2, and below is a list of sources for students in different levels to practice.
In order to pick suitable content, students have to understand their current levels in the CEFR, the Duolingo English Test scales, or they simply feel it. If students want to get the DET scale scores, let's take our free 1-hour Mock test to not only understand your level but also prepare for the DET more effectively.
Conclusion: Let’s refer to one source first and choose your favourite video to practice. Improving your Listening skills is not easy, especially in the beginning. However, this can be improved over time with your dedication and commitment.
Step 2: Do the Shadowing technique and Take notes
The benefits of Shadowing are undoubtedly phenomenal. Shadowing helps us improve our Intonation, Pauses, Pace, and Pronunciation. By shadowing, we actually imitate all things Speakers say, which helps us learn how new words are pronounced and used in a real context.
But how do we do the shadowing technique? We simultaneously repeat what speakers say and imitate their pace, pauses, intonation, and pronunciation while listening to video content.
On YouTube, especially some channels like Oxford Online English and BBC Learning English, most video content has subtitles, which is truly important to do shadowing. While listening to a YouTube video (or other platforms but it should have subtitles to help students do shadowing), we turn subtitles on and repeat them right after the speakers say it. By doing so, we are able to imitate everything, including their intonation, pauses, pronunciation, and even rhythm. On top of that, we are able to take notes of new words, phrases, collocations, and idioms.
For example, we learn from this video content: “Why pay for bottled water?” on the BBC Learning English YouTube channel. We turn on subtitles to do shadowing and take notes of new words at the same time, and we found some words such as:
Enriched
Come up trumps
cre: BBC Learning English
cre: BBC Learning English
Please always remember to take notes of new words, collocations, idioms, or anything you can learn from. BUT DO NOT look up their meanings or pronunciation while listening because it interrupts our Listening process, which does NO good to our improvement.
Before moving on to the next step, English learners should listen to the whole video one more time and take notes of words they miss from the previous attempt.
Step 3: Review all words
It’s time to review all keywords or any new words, collocations, and idioms that we take notes of earlier. For example, in Step 2, we have “enriched” and “Come up trumps”. Let’s look them up in Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries or Cambridge Dictionary, and we have the following results.
cre: Oxford Learner's Dictionaries
(1) Enrich something: to improve the quality of something, often by adding something to it.
(2) Enrich something (with something): to improve the quality of food (something) by adding vitamins or nutrients.
So from our video sample, “it’s enriched with salts” means that people add salts to bottled water to improve its quality with vitamins or nutrients - the (2) meaning. Students should check all meanings of a word carefully before forming their final decision because one word may have more than one meaning.
cre: Oxford Learner's Dictionaries
Come up trumps: to do what is necessary to make a particular situation successful, especially when this is sudden or unexpected.
So from our video sample, “Tap water is way more regulated than bottled water is, and in taste tests, tap water comes up trumps most times.” This means that most of the time tap water tastes better than bottled water, which is something that people do not expect.
Choosing suitable content is truly vital in Step 1 because if we pick Difficult content, we may spend hours committed to looking up lots of new words. After reviewing all new words, students should one more time listen to the whole video content to reinforce all new words and prepare for the next step.
Step 4: Summarise what we hear
Summarising helps us strengthen keywords, learn how to paraphrase, and understand general ideas deeply. Until this moment, we have listened to the whole video content at least three times in addition to understanding all new words or idioms, which means we have everything we need to summarise the content.
If students aren’t confident yet in making a summary, feel free to listen to the video content one more time, please take a couple of minutes to summarise verbally.
We strongly recommend students record their summaries and pay close attention to their talk after finishing for improvement. There are some major elements that students could pay attention to:
Unmeaning words: "Um, ah, well, you know, etc." are unmeaning words. Students say them when they don't have ideas to discuss or find hard to express themselves due to a lack of necessary vocabulary. Thus, let's count how many times you use unmeaning words, and ask what you should do to minimise using those unmeaning words.
Fluency: Did you take a long time to speak or move on to other points? Did you pause in the middle of your talk to brainstorm or decide what words to use? Did you speak too slow, too fast or just right? Asking these questions helps you identify your fluency level and you will know how to improve it.
Pronunciation: It's impossible for you to identify wrong pronunciations if you pronounce them incorrectly. You will need tutors or teachers to help you out. Nonetheless, teachers are costly, and most of students cannot afford it. But it's okay as you can utilise our DET Practice Platform to help you identify all pronunciation mistakes when you practice all Speaking question types.
This is our summary: The video indicates several reasons why people pay for bottled water after comparing the benefits of tap water and bottled water. Interestingly, Tap water is beneficial to our health but the brands try to convince us that tap water isn’t healthy as bottled water to make profits.
Step 5: Listen again and again
After Step 4, most English learners think it’s enough to move on to another video for good because they completely understand general ideas and new words. But how long are they able to remember, far less use new words naturally in Speaking and Writing?
cre: DET Practice
Listening and learning new words is one thing, but using them naturally is another, which requires more effort to master. Therefore, the best way to use new words effectively is to review the video content from time to time. Students may listen to the video content once or twice a week while cooking, on the go, or taking showers to save time for other tasks.
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Listening and Reading are the two input skills, students will hardly improve their output (Speaking and Writing) without adding more input to themselves on a daily basis. As a result, we truly need to practice our Reading and Listening every day, which are ways to gain more knowledge and widen our vocabulary bank.
To DET takers who are looking for Duolingo English Test preparation materials, let’s take a look at the following sources.
DET Practice Platform: Thousands of practice questions are available in addition to instant feedback for all question types. Regarding Speaking question types, test-takers receive feedback based on Fluency, Grammatical Accuracy, Lexical Sophistication, Lexical Diversity, and Acoustic Features.
DET Preparation course: A detailed study road map helps students prepare from the beginning. Even if you are a beginner, simply follow your instructor’s guide step by step to get your DET desired scores.
Make sure that you spend enough time to improve your skills in everyday life as it's the only way to obtain your desired scores. We wish you the best of luck on your preparation journey.
