English Learners

Here are a few skills that English learners can use to help them face the difficulties.

• Listening for gist

• Listening for details

• Inferring meaning

• Predicting content

• Detecting signposts

Using clues and prior knowledge about a situation to work out the meaning of what we hear is the technique of ...

• Listening for gist

• Listening for details

• Inferring meaning

• Predicting content

• Detecting signposts

Depending on the context – a news report, a university lecture, an exchange in a supermarket – you can often predict the kind of words and style of language the speaker will use. Our knowledge of the world helps us anticipate the kind of information we are likely to hear.
This is the technique of ...

• Listening for gist

• Listening for details

• Inferring meaning

• Predicting content

• Detecting signposts

Many English learners often say that listening is the most challenging of all the skills in English.

• TRUE

• FALSE

There are many difficulties an individual may face in understanding a talk, lecture or conversation in a second language.

• TRUE

• FALSE

The difficulties that an individual may face include the speaker talking quickly, background noise, a lack of visual clues, the listener’s limited vocabulary, a lack of knowledge of the topic, and an inability to distinguish individual sounds.

• TRUE

• FALSE

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. If it is a conversation, you might wait to hear someone beginning a question with 'How old…?' This is the technique of ...

• Listening for gist

• Listening for details

• Inferring meaning

• Predicting content

• Detecting signposts

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 'in summary' to indicate the next part of the talk. 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').

Understanding these phrases is the technique of ...

• Listening for gist

• Listening for details

• Inferring meaning

• Predicting content

• Detecting signposts

When listening, it is also possible to get the ‘whole picture’ but with one crucial difference: information comes in a sequence. And in that sequence of information, there are content words (the nouns, adjectives and verbs) that can help you form that picture. For example, the words 'food', 'friends', 'fun', 'park' and 'sunny day' have their own meanings, but when you hear the words in sequence, they help form the context of a picnic.

This is the technique of ...

• Listening for gist

• Listening for details

• Inferring meaning

• Predicting content

• Detecting signposts

If you are taking a listening test, skim through the questions first and try to predict what kind of information you need to listen out for.

This is the tip for ...

• Listening for gist

• Listening for details

• Inferring meaning

• Predicting content

• Detecting signposts