Chapter 6 – Listening or Viewing Skills
Listening/Viewing Strategies & Stories
Keli Yerian; Logan Fisher; and Bibi Halima
Let’s take a closer look at some specific strategies to improve your listening/viewing skills. These are some actionable steps based on the research and broader principles we’ve already discussed that you can incorporate into your regular language learning routine. Some of them were crowd-sourced from students in our LING 144 Learning How to Learn Languages class when they reflected on their own language learning journeys and shared some of their favorite and preferred methods. We expect to gather more example strategies from future cohorts of students.
Make sure to click on the strategies below to see more about each one. Some of them are illustrated by personal stories and media created by students.
Metacognitive strategies for listening/viewing
Make a goal to recognize 5-10 new words per week
Of course you can choose to learn more than 5-10, but we are modeling how to set realistic goals! The goal of “recognizing” means that when you are listening, you will know what a word (or phrase or grammatical element) means without guessing at the meaning or needing to look it up. This is different from (and much easier than) being able to recall the word on your own when speaking/signing or writing. We all have a much larger receptive vocabulary than productive vocabulary, including in our first language(s).
To build your receptive vocabulary, prioritize noticing words that you hear or see repeatedly across different contexts, and add these new words to your vocabulary list. If you are hearing or seeing them often, they are probably either high-frequency words or are key words for the specific topic. If they are words that you think you will need to use in your own speaking or signing, you can consciously start using them yourself as productive vocabulary.
Think about context and genre
You will mentally process spoken or signed text much more easily if you are aware of the context in which it was produced, as well as what genre the text is. For example, if you know you’re listening to a weather report on a TV weather channel, you will know what to listen for, such as the names of places local to you before listening more closely to details, assuming that the local weather is most relevant to you. You’ll also know that you need to look at the screen in order to understand “a storm over here” and “heat wave coming in this way” through the speaker’s gestures. You might also be less concerned with understanding all the technical weather vocabulary as long as you can get the gist of the report.
As another example, if you know that you are listening to someone’s personal podcast instead of a formal news show, you might value the opinions of the speakers differently. The opinions of someone invited to speak on a news show might be more credible than the opinions of someone publishing their own work in a podcast.
Think about your purpose fo