5 Secrets to Improve Your English Listening Skills | Go Natural English

hello and welcome to go natural English I'm your English teacher Gabby and I'm here to share with you five secrets to native English listening skills this is a sneak preview of my full listening skills course called the 17 secrets to native English listening skills I want to share five of the top tips that will help you immediately to improve your English listening skills I know that this is one of the hardest parts of becoming fluent in English is being able to understand native speakers but not any more I'm here to help you so let's get right into it the first of our five secrets is a surprise perhaps it is mindset you see we can approach a situation with a positive or a negative mindset a can-do or a cannot do mindset if you approach an English conversation with a negative mindset telling yourself things that are untrue like I'm bad at English or I'll never understand what they're going to say or I'm so embarrassed this is awful I want to run away then I'm afraid to say but you probably won't do very well however if you turn that around flip it on its head 180 degrees and you approach an English conversation with a positive mindset thinking things like I can do this I can understand native English speakers I'm patient I'm relaxed I can get this I am a good English speaker then chances are you will understand much more and you will do so much better in that raishin so please begin with a can-do attitude approach every opportunity to use English to listen to English with a positive mindset I believe in you I believe you can do it now I need you to believe in you to approach English with a positive mindset the second secret is to listen speech and read in order to improve your listening skills in English you see improving your listening skills really requires using other skills as well like reading and speaking you'll learn a lot faster if you use more than one skill to help you develop your listening it's kind of like cross-training for a sport if you enjoy playing soccer for example or football as they call it in the rest of the world we call it soccer in the United States you of course are going to practice soccer you're going to practice so that you can become better but what if you want to improve different muscles your coach might recommend that you try some other exercises besides soccer drills your coach might recommend that you try some swimming or weightlifting or running to improve your endurance and your capabilities on the field so that's what we're doing with different skills in English to improve your listening I want you to consider using your reading skills to improve your listening here's how I want you to use materials like this video where you can listen and read to the same material like you're reading the subtitles right so you could do this with the news with movies with anything that has audio and catch that's the same so you could start by listening only to challenge yourself then you could listen and read the subtitles at the same time to confirm what you're hearing and to train your ear while you're seeing the words great so listening only first then listening and reading together and the third word I mentioned the third skill was to speak so when you're listening to a material the next step is to actually repeat what you hear when you repeat immediately after what you hear this is a technique called shadowing or mimicking as soon as you hear a word you say it out loud and it helps to say it loud with feeling so that you can feel some action and emotion in your words this will help you to remember the sound so when you actually can produce the sound it's more likely that you'll be able to hear it because you'll be paying very close attention to that sound so that you can say it so again listen read and speak listen first then listen and read then listen read and speak the third secret its diversity it's so important to include a good mix of listening materials into your English practice now diversity can mean many things let's start with the length of the material you're listening to I would suggest to begin with shorter materials maybe one minute two minutes three minutes that way you don't get too tired then you could try and longer materials 10 15 20 minutes then TV shows that are 30 minutes 45 minutes an hour long and then full movies that are an hour two hours or even longer that way you can mix them different lengths of materials so that you don't get too tired or when you're ready for a challenge you can try longer materials diversity also means a wide array of voices try listen to both men and women speak English people of different ages people who do different jobs or are talking about different topics now this is another kind of diversity it's very important to train your ear by listening to different topics listening to different people talk about different subjects so if you are already very well-versed in art then it will be easier for you to listen in English about art if you want a challenge try returning to something in English about science or business or something completely different than what you would usually listen to the fourth secret is to guess first when you're listening in English the best thing that you can do is to try to anticipate what you're going to hear based on the situation so we know in certain contexts what people are likely to say let's say that I am waiting at a bus station it's likely that the man who just spoke to me is asking me for the time or perhaps if I know something about the bus schedule right what about in another situation if you're at a cafe maybe if you're ordering a coffee it's likely that the person at the register will ask you how you like your coffee right so don't be caught off guard as if everything in English is an unexpected surprise that you're not ready for you are ready for it just use your common sense and try to guess first then confirm with your ears whether you are correct our fifth and final secret is to understand the big idea in English English like other languages like your native language have patterns we have certain conversational patterns in small talk and exchanging information and ideas now it's important to understand how conversations usually go from the beginning of the conversation to the end pay attention to key vocabulary words and listen to the function words this is something I talk about in my full course 17 secrets to native English listening skills how you can listen to stress patterns to figure out the most important information in a conversation and to understand the main idea even if you didn't catch all of the smaller function words that aren't as important this is the most important thing when you're listening to English is to try to catch the main idea and then you can ask questions to clarify these are the five secrets that will help you to immediately improve your English listening skills first of all approach English with a positive mindset second listen read and speak to improve your listening skills third remember to include loss of diversity in your listening materials for watch for patterns and try to guess based on the con of a conversation what you're going to hear so try to predict the future of the conversation you're in I'm sis understand the big picture and the main idea I hope that these five secrets help you in fact I know that they will I'd love to give you a sample of my full course of 17 secrets to native English listening skills when you visit gonaturalenglish.com slash secret you can click right here to get your free sample right now thanks so much for watching and have a great day bye for now

Channel: Go Natural English

Views: 500,413

Keywords: English Listening, English Speaking, American English, Study English, Learn English, Learn American English, English Conversation, Learn English Online, Spoken English, Learn English Grammar, Free English Lessons, Go Natural English, English Speaking Course, How to speak English fluently, how to improve your english listening skills, 5 secrets, 5 secrets to improve

Id: Sy_xpdrnQXs

Length: 11min 6sec (666 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 22 2017