Ways to improve your English listening skills quickly
Listening is one of the four modules in IELTS Exam and sometimes it can bother candidates. In fact, as per a survey listening section in IELTS is considered to be the most difficult one. As we are not native speakers of the English language, we find it difficult to speak comfortably.
How to overcome the barriers of English listening?
There are few things on which we should focus such as accent, intonation, and pronunciation. In listening there are often different kind of voices and pitches that you should carefully listen as we all know that listening is played only once. Without further ado, let’s jump on to the best tips to improve IELTS listening skills.
Switch to English
To grasp a good hold on language we have to come out of our comfort zone of language. You need to swtich to English language for all little things to gain more confidence and fluency. Switching to English means you should start the following things right now!
– English dailies or tabloids
– English movies
– English series or daily soaps
– English literature or books
– English news
Use subtitles
These days you have the technology to put the subtitles on. In-case you don’t understand the language or the intonation, you can always take help of these subtitles to understand the speech. The text written at the bottom of the screen will help you understand each word spoken by a native speaker. Over the period, your brain will start recognizing the accent and intonation of any speech you are hearing. This is one of the most commonly used method to increase yourknowledge on different types of accent.
Improve Listening Skills
Complete practice tests
Doing test papers can help you achieve lots of skills to achieve good band in IELTS but that’s not the only thing you should invest your whole-time in. There are others things you should consider doing. Distribute your time wisely when preparing for an upcoming IELTS exam.
I recommend spending 10-15% of your preparation time completing practice papers and 85-90% of the time listening to spoken English as outlined above. Keep a balance between everything.
Listen to English every day
The listening test is basically designed to test how well you understand spoken English. So, the most obvious way to improve your listening skills is to listen to lots of English being spoken. But what exactly you should listen to?
Everything you need to improve your listening is available online for free. Take out sometime from the designed IELTS preparation schedule and listen to such videos available online.
Listen to a range of things. The test will include two monologues (one person speaking) and two conversations, so you must practice listening to both.
Identify your weaknesses
It is very important to identify your weakness and then work hard on them to improve it. There’s little point in spending hour after hour listening to spoken English and completing practice tests unless you identify your areas of weakness and then by investing time to improve these skills in particular. Target exactly what you need help with. You can even take a help of IELTS instructor to guide you through.
Is it grammar that’s letting you down, a limited range of vocabulary, or do you find it hard to follow conversations? One way to identify your biggest challenges, if you don’t already know what they are, is to analyses your results from practice tests and determine what mistakes you are making on a regular basis.
Thank you 😊
