تمرین شنیداری بیشتر

Chapter 11 : MORE LISTENING PRACTICE

Looking for another great way to practice listening to English? Perhaps you might want to follow my weekly Effortless English Show. I do a talk show about mastering spoken English. This show is a great way to get easy English listening. As most Effortless English members know, easy and relaxed English listening is an important key to speaking English fluently.

To speak English fluently, you must listen to a lot of English – preferably easy and understandable English. My show is one way to get plenty of English audio. These are a great supplement to other English lessons or materials.

It’s very easy to get my show! Just “Follow” me on Twitter. Go to Twitter.com/ajhoge. If you don’t have an account, create one. Then go to my page and click “Follow.” That’s all! It’s super easy.

Each week, check my Twitter page for “tweets” about the next Effortless English Show. Click on the link in each tweet to watch the video and download the audio.

If you prefer, you can search for the “Effortless English Podcast” on iTunes, where I put all of the audio recordings of the show.

The video recordings of past shows are also available on my YouTube channel, which is another source of learning suggestions and English audio.

Subscribe to my YouTube channel at: Youtube.com/ajhoge

Listening Practice

To help students improve their listening, I often suggest an exercise known as the “Movie Technique.” To do this, you need to pick an English-language movie that you enjoy. Again, pick a fairly easy one, where you will understand most of the words used.

Begin by watching the first scene. This should take about 3 to 5 minutes. Turn on the English subtitles. As you go through it, pause if there is a something you don’t understand. Look up the meaning of the word or phrase in an idiomatic dictionary. Watch the scene until you know all the words of it and understand.

The next day, watch the same scene again, several times. Once you understand the vocabulary, turn off the subtitles. Then watch the scene again, listening without the subtitles. Do this every day for the next five days or so. You might spend four or five days on one scene, but that’s okay. Each repetition improves your English listening ability.

Now watch the scene again, but try pausing after each sentence or phrase. Repeat the sentence out loud. In fact, don’t just repeat the sentence, act out the scene. Copy the speech of the actors. Copy their movements, facial expressions, and emotions. Pretend you are the characters in the scene. Remember the movie pronunciation exercise? This is another version of it.

This entire movie technique might take you a whole week for just one scene. When you feel you have mastered the scene, you can start the entire process again with the next scene. It might take several months to get through one movie, to really learn it, but that’s the point. The movie technique is a way to thoroughly learn and master all of the English used in a film. This method will improve your listening, your fluency, and your pronunciation. If you just watch a movie once, without using this process, you get little to no benefit from it.

WILL LISTENING TO MUSIC IMPROVE MY ENGLISH?

I get this question a lot. Personally, I don’t suggest learning English through music. I get students coming to me with lyrics, and I can’t understand half the words the singer is saying. Music is an art form with lots of imagery in the language. Even native speakers often don’t know what the singer is trying to say. Likewise, the pronunciation used in songs is not normal. Singers frequently change the natural pronunciation in order to fit the words into the melody of the music. In terms of learning English, it’s much more efficient to use television or movies. The meaning of what people are saying is usually clearer, and you also have video to provide visual cues that help you understand. So yes, please listen to English language music if you like how it sounds, but don’t expect it to help your own communication in English.