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4 Tips To Improve Your Listening Skills

improve your listening

“The rest of the exam was fine, but the listening was awful.” This is a very common complaint we hear from exam students. When we ask why, the answer is usually something like: “The quality of the cd player was bad.” or “There was a lot of background noise.” or “The room was too big and I was too far away from the speakers.”

Listening skills are often very hard to improve if you’re not living in an English speaking country and surrounded by English speakers.


So what can you do to improve?

Try to create an environment for yourself where you are surrounded by English. Use anything you have at your disposal – the radio, the t.v., even your favourite music. Use all of these things as “white noise”, background noise. Just like babies who learn the sounds of their native language by being surrounded by them from an early age, surround yourself with the sounds of English. Then, when you have time to “study”, use one or all of the following tips to improve your skills.
Below are four quick tips (plus one extra bonus tip!) to help you improve your listening skills in English.
Enjoy!

1. Listen to English speaking radio stations

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English speaking radio stations like VOA – Voice of America or BBC Radio 4 offer you the possibility to listen to the current news as well as interesting stories. 

Bear in mind that generally speaking Voice of America has speakers and presenters with American accents and the BBC has speakers and presenters with English accents.

2. Watch television series or films

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You can watch tv series or films in English on Netflix or Amazon Prime Film. You can also use Youtube to find English speaking films and series. Use subtitles at first if you need them.

3. Subscribe to a podcast

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Subscribe to an English-speaking Podcast series on whatever topic interests you. There are podcasts on just about every subject. Just like English speaking radio stations, you can listen to Podcasts while you’re on the train or while you’re driving or doing housework. Here are some places you can find podcasts:

4. Study for 15 minutes a day...every day.

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Just like any skill – swimming, driving, learning to play a musical instrument, consistency is king!

Studying, even if it’s just for 15 minutes a day every day can help you make real improvements in your listening skills.

Little and often is often more successful.

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5. Bonus Tip:

Use one of our recommended self-study books. There are truly an enormous amount of books available designed to help you study English. Our teachers have used hundreds of these books over the many years they have been teaching. That means they have done all the work for you in testing the best listening skills books for self study.
Here is their choice of the best books around to help you improve your listening skills:

This text book is full of short simple dialogues, ideal for lower levels (A2)  or for students who feel “blocked” with their listening skills.

Tape scripts and solutions make this series of graded text books ideal for self study. The second book in the series is useful for students at a B1 level.

Consolidating your listening skills at a B2 level is essential if you’re preparing for an English exam.
Our students have always found this book useful.

Advanced level listening exercises provide practice for exam students and for people who use English at work.

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