Listening strategies

• Engels
• MBO
• Studiejaar 3

Listening strategies

Why is it important to practice listening?

Here's why

• 45% of time used in communication is spend on listening     (30% speaking, 16% reading, 9% writing)
• To avoid misunderstandings
• To detect emotions
• To prepare you for speaking

Listening strategy 1

• Predicting content (look at the title, look for pictures, clues). 

       Difficult in an exam

Listening strategy 2

• "Looking" for the gist 

(getting a global picture). 

You need words to further determine

See exercise on the next slide 

What do you think of when you look at the following words:
food, friends, fun, park, sunny day

Listening strategy 3

• Signposts in language

For example, if a university lecturer says: 'I am going to talk about three factors affecting global warming…' then later on you might hear the phrases 'first of all', 'moving on to' and "lastly". At the end you will probably here 'in summary' or 'in conclusion' to indicate the summarizing of the speech. 
Other words and phrases can function in a similar way. For instance, to clarify ('in other words', 'to put it another way'); to give examples ('to illustrate this', 'for example'), and so on. 

Listening strategy 4

• Listening for details

Listen for words related to the information you need to find...

In a listening test, if you are asked to write down the age of a person, listen for the words related to age ('old', 'young', 'years', 'date of birth', etc.) or a number that could represent that person's age.

Practice

Listen to the following clip

How old is this lady?

How old does she feel?

In what year was she born?

How old is this lady?

1. 65
2. 112
3. 100
4. 103

How old does she feel?

1. 112
2. 100
3. 65
4. 25

In what year was she born?

1. 1906
2. 1911
3. 1909
4. 1910

Listening strategy 5

• Inferring meaning 

Imagine you are a tourist in a country whose language you do not speak. In a restaurant, you hand over a credit card to pay for the bill, but the server seems to say something apologetic in response. Even though you don't understand his words, you can probably conclude that the restaurant doesn't take credit cards, and you need to pay with cash instead.

Practice 

Explain what we are hearing

• Listen to the clip
• Listen to content words to complete the picture for yourself
• Describe the situation in the next slide

Describe the situation

test-english.com

Describe the situation in English/Dutch