How to improve your listening skills

 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:

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

How to gain fluency

 How to gain fluency -- written three years ago

What do they need to be fluent in another language? The one million dollar question many would like answered. Doing so is not as easy as providing an answer to it. We teachers have reeled off ways and tools and methods, etc that should and would help students gain fluency. Haven't we? But do they? Well yes. But it takes a while.
We have all said that it's as little difficult as trying not to think in your own language and translating word by word! No need to say that in the first place would be having vocabulary enough and the speed to retrieve and use this when you need it. And if they are not quick enough to use what they know you know, having enough strategies, resources to keep speaking coherently while they are digging for the right expression/word. Yes! expression: it's much effective to learn in chunks. I always tell them to try no to learn one word at a time, but the word with the preposition it goes with or the word it usually goes with, ...i'll give you examples later.
In my opinion, unless they have an ok command of the language, exposure to real life, authentic and native speed delivery is usually frustrating! Exposure to stuff they feel you understand most of it, it's pointless to have lots of native input if they have no idea of the words used, pronunciation and the effect of mispronunciation!
It's true that much as pronunciation is important we will all agree that it's not a matter of sounding like a native speaker, as long as what they produce is understandable, it should be fine! there's really no need to speak native-like! specially if they communicate with other non-native speakers. Plus students would certainly agree that it's a lot more encouraging if you speak to other learners with slightly higher levels than you.

More later...

And how do you evaluate speaking?
- with the range of structure and vocabulary they use now as opposed to xyz ago.You can record conversations and months later record a similar one and compare. Alternatively, take notes of the students strengths and weaknesses.
- how quickly they understand what's being said/asked and if they respond accordingly
- how fluent they've become
- what mistakes have been addressed/ corrected
- how much self-correction there is / awareness of mistakes, confidence.


how to become more fluent:
- speak more, listen to real english, meet native speakers and good users (and get corrected). listen and write to help you remember things. take a notebook with you to write down words.
-listen to what native do..: insert expressions, stress words / patterns..
-think in english
-speak to yourself in english
-read out loud
-the more vocab you know and pronounce correctly (therefore can identify at normal speed delivery) the more quickly you'll learn it. the more confident they'll get and as a result eventually more fluent.
-have very clear patterns of use of confusing words (ie. manage to / sth)
-dictations and write expressions they hear.

What linguists and experts and many others often say that the ability to improve your skills at speaking a certain language is gained by speaking may be true for some but I'd dare to say that with the right feedback and corrections and motivation from the teacher (to me, there's nothing like having a teacher up to a certain level). Correction and understanding why structures are the way they are, having the right word or expression for the right context so as long as there is relevant previous exposure to English and correction, in this case ... Many adults want to know and understand their mistakes, both those accuracy- and fluency-oriented students.
Yet some learn to speak by taking a very active role in listening. (it worked well as just by listening for contexts in which a certain word that caught their attention - even if they had never came across the word or expression - you learned it. From my experience, those accuracy-oriented students find dictations a good way of learning to speak, reading out loud may be too, although i am in the process of testing this.

It also helps being familiar with sth, I think it's important to develop an awareness of the process, first being made aware of words, discourse markers, etc, knowing sth exists or sth is said this way or that, and being reminded of it (often). Then identifying it in a utterance, spotting it again and again (as a word, an expression, a phrasal verb..) and associating this words with a meaning according to context (be quick enough to put together the words and the meaning according to where it appears in and the final stages of learning (and at last acquiring it hopefully) using it, and being corrected if not used appropiately.

Lesson of the day for me...as the teacher.
Once again life tells me you can't judge a horse by its teeth. People who seem to be in two different worlds might be closer than you judge them to be.

IATEFL British Council