How to improve your listening skills (and oral production). -written three years ago or + I am actually transfering stuff from my howadultslearn wiki onto the blog here.
A lot of students see themselves to be familiar with grammar but they feel stuck with listening, understanding skils. It's a very tricky area. Understanding oral production can be very hard, it's not easy. After a certain age, our phonological system stops being able to produce new sounds (new to our existing sounds). That makes the listening and the production of certain sounds hard, which also has an impact on our listening understanding skills. It's not quick. Yet, it's not only that. The way I see it, if you lack a good grasp of grammar, clearly understanding the difference between tenses so as to get the right idea (ie finished or unfinished), a wide range of vocabulary of the topic you are spoken about and an awareness of connected speech, weak forms, etc it's going to be hard to truely achieve this level of understanding students aim to. I am not saying it's impossible to achieve, I am a non-native speaker myself. Improving your listening, as students says, is achieveable but often slow and it requires training and help in most cases. On top of that there's the primary or secondary school background, a lot of students in Spain have a not nice aftertaste of their school year as far as English goes and they are a bit stuck, blocked more than unable to understand.
So get reading, get listening, get someone to help you polish up and listen out for little sounds that make a world of a difference in the sentence, learn the connectors and conjuctions, not just the key words that help you interpret the general idea but they show you the flow of the utterance. You won't understand if you dont know the language or the grammar, you'll think you understand cos you make two and two together out of the key words you do catch. Make a bigger effort and analyse the whole sentence without being obssessed with it as probably there's no need for it!
See below:A lot of students see themselves to be familiar with grammar but they feel stuck with listening, understanding skils. It's a very tricky area. Understanding oral production can be very hard, it's not easy. After a certain age, our phonological system stops being able to produce new sounds (new to our existing sounds). That makes the listening and the production of certain sounds hard, which also has an impact on our listening understanding skills. It's not quick. Yet, it's not only that. The way I see it, if you lack a good grasp of grammar, clearly understanding the difference between tenses so as to get the right idea (ie finished or unfinished), a wide range of vocabulary of the topic you are spoken about and an awareness of connected speech, weak forms, etc it's going to be hard to truely achieve this level of understanding students aim to. I am not saying it's impossible to achieve, I am a non-native speaker myself. Improving your listening, as students says, is achieveable but often slow and it requires training and help in most cases. On top of that there's the primary or secondary school background, a lot of students in Spain have a not nice aftertaste of their school year as far as English goes and they are a bit stuck, blocked more than unable to understand.
So get reading, get listening, get someone to help you polish up and listen out for little sounds that make a world of a difference in the sentence, learn the connectors and conjuctions, not just the key words that help you interpret the general idea but they show you the flow of the utterance. You won't understand if you dont know the language or the grammar, you'll think you understand cos you make two and two together out of the key words you do catch. Make a bigger effort and analyse the whole sentence without being obssessed with it as probably there's no need for it!
I know of a website which teaches English in Spanish: (i'll translate that shortly): here is a part of a contribution i made to it. This is a bit of a piece of advice for those who find understanding oral production hard:
Al fin y al cabo todos tus seguidores ya tienen la base que les dejaron los profes de rpimaria y secundaria. Creo que es muy indicado explicar conceptos, compararlos.
Hay que entender que para...por ejemplo, listening, para mejorar el listening skill hay que aceptar que es un proceso lento, que require de tener consciencia de los sonidos y de las diferencias entre sonidos, que si no se tiene el vocabulario es normal no entender, y que el cerebro os dará la palabra más parecida que sepáis a lo que oigáis (hoy por ejemplo he hecho un listening con una alumna donde aparecía la palabra "strains" que no conocía y ella ha pensado en "strange"...solo hay un sonido distinto y entendia lo que sabía, no lo que no sabía) ; y que es muy bueno entender la relación entre palabras para captar lo que resulta dificil de captar (weak forms)(pronunciación), aprender vocabulario no palabra a palabra sino en collocations
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