I'm curious if this situation
sounds familiar to you: you listen to a new podcast in
English and you love it. In fact, maybe you even get a bit addicted to it, a podcast like SERIAL or Unlocking Us. Not only do you fall in
love with the podcast, but you are so excited to
talk about it with someone. The problem is after you listen, the podcast becomes one of those things
that is in one ear and out the other. What that idiom means is it
something that you heard and maybe understood, but you quickly forgot it. The problem is maintaining or
remembering the key points or the vocabulary that you want to
use to talk about that podcast. Or maybe you just don't feel comfortable
doing it. Like some of my students, you might also feel that you have
to listen to the podcast multiple times if you want to talk
about it effectively. And that's frustrating because of course
you only have so much time in the day. These are all things that some of my
students have said about their struggles, listening to podcasts. And if
any of those sound like you, I want you to know that today
you're in the right place. If you don't already know, I'm
Annemarie with Speak Confident English, this is exactly where you want to be
every week to get the confidence you want for your life and work in English. Although this lesson is primarily focused
on sharpening your listening skills, this is an important step toward
better communication in English. To have effective conversations
we have to also know how to carefully listen to others. We need to be in tune to the conversation, understand what others are saying, maintain that information so that we can
repeat it or talk about it effectively in conversations. By the end of
this Confident English lesson, you will have a clear three step
process that combines your love of podcasts with effective English
practice activities that helped sharpen your listening skills. Ultimately not only will you be able to
understand and talk about your favorite podcasts in English more easily, but you'll also sharpen your
listening skills overall. Before we dive in today, I want to remind you that it is a
hundred percent okay to listen to podcasts simply for entertainment, without a specific goal in mind, or without trying to practice
specific listening skills. However, when you want to commit some of your
English practice time to improving your listening skills using podcasts, here is a simple three step
process to follow. Number one, choose the right podcast. Number two, level up your listening skills
with effective practice activities. And number three, set yourself
up for success with good habits. Let's talk a little bit more
about each one of those steps. And along the way I will give you simple
step-by-step activities that you can practice any time. So let's go
back and start with number one, how to choose the right podcast. If you are using it to
improve your listening skills. First always identify a topic
that is interesting to you just because someone else recommends a
podcast doesn't mean that you'll love it. And that's okay. When you're
practicing your English skills, it's really important that you
enjoy what you're learning, especially at your level. Choosing a podcast that isn't interesting
to you is ultimately going to lead to boredom and possibly even
giving up on your practice. The activities that I'll
share with you today, you can use with any podcasts
that you already enjoy, or if you're looking for a new one, I have a very long list of
recommendations on my website to get that list of recommended podcasts. Simply visit this lesson on the Speak
Confident English website with the link below the video, as you consider
topics that are of interest to you. I also want you to think about
your ultimate goal for a specific activity. This doesn't
mean your goal in general, you might have multiple goals
in your listening skills, but when you sit down to practice
for 15 or 20 or 30 minutes, I want you to think
about one specific goal. Do you want to increase your
vocabulary on a specific topic or perhaps you're working to
comprehend native speakers more easily? All of those goals might influence
the podcast that you choose. The third factor you should consider
when you're trying to choose the right podcast to improve your listening skills
is to think about how long you can dedicate to listening
to a specific episode. If you have 15 or 20 minutes
to dedicate to your practice, then choosing a podcast that
is short or a podcast that can easily be broken up into smaller
components is your best choice after you've selected the right podcast for you. The second step in this process is to
level up your listening skills with effective practice
activities. In this section, I want to talk about three different
practice activities that you can do to sharpen those listening
skills and retain what you've learned. In other words, remember
what you've learned in the podcast, whether it's new vocabulary or the key
points that the speaker shares so that you feel comfortable talking about it
in conversations after you listen. Now, before I share these
practice activities with you, I want you to remember that each
of these is a separate practice activity. Rather than
combine them all at one time, I recommend that you stay
mindful of each separate activity. One activity is focused
more on vocabulary building. Another activity is focused more on
sharpening your ability to understand the key points. All of these are fantastic goals to have
for your listening skills in English, but they are different
skills. And as a result, they require a different approach. If you want to do all of these, what I recommend is choose
one podcast, one episode, and use the same podcast for
three or four days in a row and each day choose one of these
activities so that you're focused on a specific kind of listening. So
let's start with practice activity. Number one, listen for overall gist. What that means is to listen for
the big picture. The main idea. In this kind of listening, you're not
focused on the tiny little details, but rather understanding
what the main messages of the speaker. When you're working to improve your
listening skills for capturing those main ideas, here's what you
can do. First of course, choose your podcast. And second,
before you start to listen, begin to prepare a little mind
map. Rather than try to listen, understand, and remember everything without
any help it's much better to write down some of the keywords or key
ideas while you're listening. This helps commit those
important ideas to your memory. It also becomes something
that's easy to visualize. So in two or three days, when you're
in a conversation with a coworker, you can start to picture or visualize
the mind map that you created while you were listening. And it begins to bring those
keywords or important points to your memory. So before you click
the play button on the podcast, start your mind map by putting the title
of the podcast or the interview in the middle, and then begin to use question
words to help you anticipate what the speaker will share. For example, you might begin to think about who
or what the speaker is talking about. What is the specific skill? What are the steps required
to gain that skill? Why are these steps important? I'm using those question
words who, what, why, how to help me anticipate what's coming. If you were creating a mind
map of this lesson today, it might look something like this.
Then as you listen to the podcast, begin to complete that mind map. Again, the point of this activity is to
help you be focused on listening for those key points. The things that the
speaker really wants you to remember, and it will help commit these ideas to
memory so that you can talk about them more easily. The second practice activity you can use
for sharpening your listening skills, using podcasts is to listen and
read for vocabulary building. Now with this one, you definitely want to find
podcasts that provide a transcript. With this activity, combining listening
skills and vocabulary building, you'll want to listen and
read the transcript together as you do that. I want
you to highlight circle, write down any of the words
that are new to you or that you want to remember. There may be idioms or phrasal
verbs that you hear that, you know, you've heard them before, but you
never really used them in speaking. And now you want to make sure
you remember those new phrases so that you can use them in conversation. So as you listen and read the transcript, have a tool available that will
allow you to highlight or write down those phrases that you want to remember.
Once you're finished listening, go back and review any of the
words that you've highlighted. If there are words that are
new to you before you go to the dictionary, I want you to
challenge yourself and try
to understand them based on context. See if you can pinpoint the meaning
based on the other words and sentences around that key word. Let me give
you an example of what I mean. Imagine this is a sentence from a podcast
and the word affluent is new to you. Look at that full sentence and see if
there's anything else that gives you a clue about the possible meaning
of affluent from this sentence. We know that this family has always
lived in the most expensive part of the city. So what does that tell
you about their background? What might affluent mean? This kind of activity of using
the context really sharpens your ability to understand new
words in conversations, in podcasts. When you hear them learning to do this
effectively will also help you avoid getting lost in conversations when
someone uses something that you've never heard before. So when you
do something like this, take a few moments to write down
what you think that word might mean. Then go to a dictionary to confirm it. These two steps are essential
to learning the new vocabulary, but now we need to commit it to memory. One of the best things that you can
do is immediately take that new word phrase or idiom and use it
in your own example sentence. So once you've learned that the
word of fluent means wealthy, how would you use it in your own sentence, doing that consistently
over a period of days, we'll give you the repetition you
need with a new word so that you committed to memory and
you're able use it easily in conversations going forward. And now the third practice activity
you can use to level up your listening skills is to focus on global listening or listen, to understand the finer details. What I mean by all of this
is to read between the lines that phrase means to find the hidden
meaning or the meaning that is understood without being said, clearly, we also refer to this as layers
of meaning in our speaking, I might say good morning to someone, but if my voice sounds angry and I
crossed my arms like this and say, good morning, do I really
mean good morning? No, of course not. There are different layers of
meaning in just those two words. When we're speaking, there's a wealth of information that
gets communicated through the way that we pause, our word stress,
intonation, and so on. So if you want to work on understanding
these additional layers of meaning using a podcast, here are some questions that you
can think about as you're listening. Number one, what emotions or opinions does
the speaker convey as they speak? If a speaker says, I'm sad, of
course we know that they feel sad. They told us, but sometimes the
speaker doesn't say I'm sad, but we hear it in their voice. And that's
what I want you to pay attention to. What do you hear in their
voice to answer that question, you may need to go back and listen
to that short segment again, to see what exactly happened that
told you how they felt or what their real opinion was. Was it a pause, some sort of emphasis or
some unexpected intonation? See if you can pinpoint how
the speaker used her voice to communicate that layer of meaning, as you consider that you can also
think about what is being communicated through intonation, stress? Is
the speaker, communicating power, humor, disbelief, or
certainty as you listen, take notes on what you hear. Not only does this activity help
to sharpen your ability to listen and read between the lines, but once you understand how speakers
use their voice to communicate other layers of meaning and emotion, you can begin to utilize
those same skill sets in your own communication. All right, now that you know all about
choosing the right podcast and three different activities you can use
to level up your listening skills. Let's talk about step number three, set yourself up for
success with good habits. Practicing all of this
just one time is great, but it isn't going to improve your
listening skills. Like anything in life, if you want to improve
and really make progress, it has to become a habit,
something that you do consistently. So how can you utilize podcasts
effectively to build those good habits? Strategy number one is
to be realistic and fit your listening practice into your lifestyle. If you only have a little bit
of time on your way to work, or when you're walking the dog in
the afternoon, that's perfectly fine. And you can choose the activity that
will fit your time constraints the best. Of course, if
you're driving to work, that's not the best time to focus on
building vocabulary because you definitely should not be reading a
transcript while you're driving. But that could be a great time where
you focus on listening to those finer details or layers of meaning because you
don't need to be writing anything down. Strategy number two is to take
advantage of playback speed. If you're working on understanding
native speakers more easily, don't be afraid to slow down the
playback speed so that you can hear the speaker clearly and become
comfortable with how they speak. As you adjust and sharpen
your listening skills, you can then begin to speed up the
playback speed either to a normal speed or even faster using the playback
speed to your advantage will definitely reduce how often you have to
go back and listen to the whole podcast again, or repeat a specific segment
to catch what the speaker said. Ultimately, it'll save you time. Strategy number three for setting
yourself up for success with good habits is to meet with friends and
reflect on what you've learned. Maybe even listen to a podcast with
some of your friends and set aside time to talk about it by creating that
time to meet with friends and talk about what you've learned. Not only are you
automatically building in accountability, which helps with developing
a consistent habit, but you're also creating an opportunity
to get confident in talking about what you've learned, reusing some of
the vocabulary and it's super fun. The last strategy for setting yourself
up for success by building good habits is to be patient with yourself. Progress does not happen overnight. It takes time and consistent
practice. And with that, you have a three-step process to
improve your English listening skills, using podcasts plus three
activities you can use any time you want before we finish. I want to remind you that if you're
looking for a new podcast to help you get started in improving
your listening skills, I have a full list of recommended
podcasts to help you get started. You can find that list at the
Speak Confident Englishwebsite. Just use the link below the
video, and while you're there, be sure to share your favorite podcast
with me and everyone else in the Confident Englishcommunity. If you
found this lesson useful to you today, as always, I would love to know, and
you can tell me in one very simple way, give this lesson a thumbs up here
on YouTube, and while you're at it, subscribe to this channel. So you never
miss one of my Confident Englishlessons. Thank you so much for joining me. Have a fantastic time getting addicted
to a brand new podcast in English, and I'll see you next time for
your Confident Englishlesson.
