If “listening” is not your strong point or you want to get more results while listening, then you are in the right place. This article is dedicated to helping English learners improve their listening skills. These strategies are not obligatory for you to have progress in listening, but you can check them out and find some which are actually useful for you.

Strategy № 1

Understand just the idea. Yes, you should not struggle to understand each word and expression in the audio. Concentrate on getting the main idea. If you have to find some details (e.g. answer questions about the content after listening) listen to the audio twice. First, listen and understand the idea. When you listen for the second time, try to find the necessary information in order to answer the questions.

Strategy № 2 

Understand the clue information by some specific words. For example, if you are listening to the audio about different flats and there are the words “New York”, “expensive”, “Madrid”, “cheaper”, knowing the context, you can predict that the idea is that “In New York, flats are really expensive and in Madrid, they are cheaper”. 

Strategy № 3

Try not to use subtitles. You should understand the speech by listening to it and not by reading the subtitles. Otherwise, how will you understand a person talking to you in real life? But if you are listening to audio and do not understand any sentence, try to listen to it several times, maybe at a slower pace. If all of this does not help, turn on the subtitles and do not give up!

Strategy № 4 

Try to understand the words by the context. If you are watching a video with subtitles, you can see all the words and make a list with some new or interesting ones. But try not to translate them at once, you can guess the meaning with the context, it is the best way! 

Strategy № 5 

Practice makes perfect. The more you practice, the better your results will be! Try to pay as much attention to listening as to speaking or writing, because it is an essential part of learning a new language. For it to be more interesting and beneficial for you, try to discuss the video or the audio with someone in English. And if you do not have a partner to communicate with, talk to Koddy. It would be great for your progress!  

To sum up, listening skills are essential for every learner, so if you are not good at it, do not give up! Just try to use these strategies. Also, in Koddy App there are created all the conditions for you to improve your listening skills and simplify this process as well!