Methods for English listening training

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Please, experts, share your valuable insights! Scope of application for this training method: If you listen to VOA’s Special English and feel that your comprehension rate is not above 50%, then there is a 90% chance that this method will be very helpful to you. Even if your vocabulary or reading level is already at the CET-4 or CET-6 level or higher, but your listening and speaking skills are weak, this method is still worth trying. I have always admired Professor Zhong’s reverse method, but I have also been opposed to an important slogan in this approach: looking up words in a dictionary while listening, until every word is understood. For a learner with a limited vocabulary or very weak listening skills, this method is akin to self-harm; more importantly, it is an inefficient approach. Why? Since the goal is to improve listening skills, if you spend too much time looking up words in a dictionary to understand their meanings, it will inevitably interfere with the training of your hearing, preventing you from achieving the desired goal. However, I also disagree with the idea of placing excessive emphasis on \"extensive listening\" in the initial stage. Although it avoids the hassle of practicing listening while relying on a dictionary, and although it maximizes the utilization of time spent receiving sound signals, the vast majority of those sound signals are completely incomprehensible to you. Sound information that one does not understand is, in fact, meaningless and does not help improve hearing. Extensive listening should be introduced gradually after reaching a basic level of listening proficiency. I also do not advocate the approach of watching original movies and shows too early. Until one’s listening skills reach a certain level, spending too much time on movies and TV shows will mostly only lead to feelings of frustration, aside from helping one learn a few more slang terms. If your vocabulary is limited, you will encounter too many slang terms and obscure words specific to certain scenarios in movies and TV shows that you cannot understand – terms that you can’t grasp even when they are shown in subtitles or when you pause the video. This is essentially like listening to meaningless audio signals, and it does not help improve listening skills. If you stop to look up a word in the dictionary, you are repeating the mistake of practicing listening while holding a dictionary. Moreover, watching movies and TV shows takes a lot of time; during the foundation-building phase, it is also an inefficient use of time since one cannot obtain the desired training and improvement from such content. So, how exactly should one train their listening skills during the foundation-building stage? First of all, the content you listen to must be something you “completely understand”. Eliminate everything that requires you to guess, because guessing itself distracts one’s attention, and at this stage, the ability to guess is extremely weak ； One certainly can’t use a dictionary either, as that not only distracts one but is also extremely time-consuming. To this end, we should deliberately choose listening materials that are not too difficult, and they must be those with transcripts. Before listening, read first; this is called “preparation before listening”: take the time to look up unfamiliar words in a dictionary, then read the material through to understand it in its entirety. Since the material is not very difficult, this preparation process usually does not take long. Try to choose textbooks with vocabulary lists, as this can save a lot of time spent looking up words in a dictionary. If you want to use your commute time to practice*, the preparation work before listening needs to be done the night before. Secondly, listen repeatedly. Repeat! Repeat! Repeat! There is no fixed number regarding how many times it needs to be repeated; in the initial stages, a text is usually read at least 50 times, and it’s not uncommon for the number to reach hundreds of repetitions. To ensure a sufficient number of repetitions, the listening material should not be too long; a duration of 1 to 2 minutes is appropriate, and it’s best not to exceed 3 minutes – this is very important. I recommend New Concept Book 2, as well as the first two units of Book 3. If you prefer the American accent, use its American version. Third, keep following along while listening. Implementation: For the first 1–3 times, you can listen to the text while reading it, and repeat what is said aloud (use silent reading if it might disturb others). If certain sentences are not easy to repeat smoothly, you can pause the playback and repeat that sentence several times. During the process of shadowing, try to forget the patterns of words, sentences, and paragraphs; the goal is to avoid traditional reading-based memory (schema-based memory) and instead train direct responses, understanding, and memory of sounds. If you are using a computer to learn*, you can switch the player to fast playback once you can follow along smoothly at normal speed, in order to conduct intensified training (Windows Media Player’s fast playback feature speeds up the audio by 1.4 times without altering the frequency, so it hardly seems like there’s any change in the sound). Continue to the next lesson only after repeating aloud smoothly without any pauses, to a level that is almost synchronized with the original audio. By this point, it is usually possible to memorize the entire text, and this memorization is based purely on sound and hearing, rather than visual memory. This process is actually simultaneous training in listening and speaking. After such training, the new words in the text are essentially fully absorbed and can be stored as long-term memory ； It also helps to deepen the understanding of text structure, as well as to improve reading and writing skills. So, it is a comprehensive form of training. Fourth, regular reviews. There are also problems with forgetting in auditory comprehension and memory. Therefore, it is necessary to set aside time regularly to review what has been learned earlier (still by listening and repeating after the speaker; usually 3 to 5 repetitions are sufficient) in order to reinforce the knowledge and establish long-term memory. The above are the main points of this method. The biggest advantage of this method is that it makes it easy to maintain concentration for long periods of time, as you need to keep following along, which makes it difficult not to focus on the audio information. Let’s talk about a related issue, namely the so-called problem of \"pseudo-comprehension\". Since what you are listening to is something you already understand, you will find that after listening three or five times you feel you have fully grasped it; many people then refrain from listening again and move on to new content, thus completing the study of a textbook quite quickly, only to realize that they haven’t made much progress. It is clear to everyone that this “understanding” actually refers to understanding through reading, rather than through listening; this is what is meant by the problem of \"false understanding\", and it is also why this training method is questioned. Since our goal is to lay a foundation for listening skills, in other words, it’s about resolving issues with the ears. At this stage, pretending to understand is inevitable, and it is a completely normal phenomenon. Our goal is not to understand much right away, but rather to undergo extensive repetitive training that stimulates the brain to respond directly to \"meaningful sound signals\" – those sound signals whose meaning has already been understood – so as to gradually adapt to them, accept them, and develop conditioned responses. With each repetition, the amount of fake components decreases by one, while the amount of real components increases by one. If you can dedicate about 2 hours per day to this type of training, it usually takes only 2 to 3 months to complete the exercises for the 96 short passages in Book 2 of New Concept. At this point, you will not only find that your listening skills have improved significantly, but you will also have completed the \"auditory memorization\" of 96 context-based passages (as opposed to those sentences without any context), which means there has been a remarkable improvement in your abilities in spoken expression, reading comprehension, and writing as well, since your overall sense of the English language has improved. This is what true “laying the foundation” means. Since the content being listened to is already understood in advance, there is no need to stick to materials with slow speech; it is completely possible to start with normal speaking speed from the beginning. Even if the audio included with the textbook you have chosen is spoken at a slow pace (which is usually the case), you can use speed-adjusting tools (such as fast playback in WMPlayer) to change it to a near-normal speed for training purposes. Once you have completed this foundational training process – my criterion for success is being able to understand roughly 80% of VOA Slow English content without any special effort – you can then move on to practicing dictation in standard English, expand your passive listening exercises, and watch more original movies and TV shows. You will find it much easier, and your confidence will increase significantly.