What Are the Stages of Listening Practise?

In our first article we discussed what materials we need to do listening practise. We briefly mentioned two kinds of listening practise: intensive and extensive. We can find the stages of listening practise in intensive listening. Because listening practise has more stages than most people think, we can do some unusual things in our listening practise. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could practise without thinking? It sounds easy. And it is.

So?? What are the stages?

Briefly put there are three stages in your listening practise, and they each overlap with the others. you can start practicing on all three stages at once if you want to but it is best to start practicing with stage one. Further, you must be clear when you are practicing. Which stage are you working on? But first, let’s look at the stages.

When you are listening, can you understand what is being said? If you can’t understand it, there are several possible reasons. They include: difficult vocabulary, difficult grammar, unable to remember the words, and unable to make out the words. The last one is our stage one.

Often people cannot make out the words or the sounds that were said. If you cannot hear the sounds clearly, you will not be able to understand. This is the base skill so we have to work on this skill first. Practicing hearing the sounds that were said is the stress free part of the practise.

So how can you practise hearing the sounds that were said? Through Shadowing. All you have to do is listen and make the same sounds as you hear at the same time you hear them. You can stop thinking and let your body do the work.

Stop thinking? That sounds strange for a teacher to say. But I say it, and I mean it. If you start thinking when you shadow, your Shadowing ability goes down. You think about the meaning of the words, and then you cannot give all your attention to hearing them.

I want to say this clearly and strongly: do not think when you are Shadowing. Just shadow. As you do that, your ability to hear the sounds will increase over time. Then, when you have a strong ability here, you may start to think about what you are hearing. This leads us to the second step.

The second step in listening practise is remembering what you hear. I had an experience once listening to a language I was studying. I was happy. I could understand every word as I heard it. When the speaker was finished though, I could not understand any of it, because I could not remember it and think about the meaning. Remembering is very important.

So, how do you practise remembering what you hear? Once again, we get a nice easy practise that doesn’t take a lot of thinking. Just remembering. All you have to do is listen and after you have listened, repeat what you heard. That’s it.

However, just listening and repeating can be difficult and painful. It is like going from zero to sixty kilometers per hour in six seconds. Exciting if you have th power, and impossible if you don’t.

This kind of practise works nicely when you practise with graded extensions. So what are graded extensions?

Graded extensions are selected portions of a long sentence, each one getting longer than the last. An example would be for the sentence:

“Last night, before I went to bed, I checked my mail, but there was none.”

The first extension might be:

“I went to bed”

And this is followed by:

“before I went to bed”

And further:

“before I went to bed, I checked my mail”

And so on, until you have the full sentence. Then go on to practise the next sentence. This kind of practise helps you build chunks. If you can build bigger chunks, then your English capacity becomes bigger and bigger. Then listening and understanding becomes much easier.

So it seems we have discussed the first two of three stages. What is the third stage? Well, if you have done your practise well at stages one and two the last stage will feel natural and easy. This stage is listening to understand.

What do you do? Nothing. Well, not nothing, but you do not have to ‘do’ anything in particular on the outside. This is the thinking stage. Listen to the recording and think about the meaning. That’s it. You do not have to repeat anymore, unless you want to.

So there are the three stages of English listening practise. The first two stages are no-thinking stages (well, not conscious thinking) and the last stage is a no-action stage. Now listening practise is purposeful, directed and much easier. You will also find it easier to make goals for your listening practise using this system.