How to Improve Listening Proficiency: Listening Between the Lines
You’ve spent hours in the classroom, gone through dozens of flash cards, and read your textbook cover to cover. Still, the moment you start a conversation in your target language, you find yourself struggling to understand much. If this scenario sounds familiar, you’re not alone — in fact, it’s a common struggle in language learning.
Enhancing listening proficiency is an important professional goal. Better listening comprehension allows you to more effectively participate in conversation and thus builds your speaking ability at the same time. It can also strengthen your pronunciation and speech segmentation — that is, how easily you separate words in a sentence and those sentences from each other — which will make a difference in your reading level. Overall, knowing how to listen effectively is important not only for accurate interpretation, but also for building trust and rapport with international colleagues.
While studies suggest that up to 50% of our time spent communicating is time spent listening, there’s more to it than just passively understanding the speaker. Honing your ability to pick up on expressive aspects such as idioms, irony, and nuance will take you from a listener who gets the gist to an advanced professional who can truly comprehend organic expression.
Why is Listening So Difficult?
Experts point out that listening, though deceptively simple, really involves an array of affective, cognitive, and behavioral processes. This might explain why many foreign language learners have trouble building up their listening skills.
The affective part of listening describes our motivation to understand and empathize with the speaker. The cognitive process is the neurological act of comprehending and interpreting speech. Lastly, the behavioral process includes the necessary verbal and nonverbal indications that we’re tuned in — in other words, the gestures and sounds that suggest active listening.
All of these processes are involved in understanding speech in a foreign language, and can help us gather the meaning beyond just the words themselves.
Beyond the Words
ICA’s academic design closely follows ACTFL and ILR guidelines. Both frameworks provide standardized criteria for measuring one’s language proficiency and performance in various areas, including listening. As you move from novice and intermediate levels to advanced levels of proficiency, the emphasis shifts away from comprehending single words and memorized phrases to attaining a dynamic, organic level of comprehension functional across various contexts. To increase your professional listening capability, consider the following areas of expression:
Idioms
Most likely, you can fill in the blanks for the following common English idioms:
They’ve let the __ out of the bag.
__ a leg!
He’s a __ in the rough.
Cat, break, diamond — this is simple pattern recognition, and you can achieve the same for your target language by taking the time to study its idioms. Knowing idioms gives your listening comprehension and fluency significant depth, as you’re understanding not the literal words, but the intention and cultural significance encoded within them.
Irony, Sarcasm, and Humor
Along a similar vein, these are communicative devices that rely on situational and cultural understanding beyond just dictionary definitions. Training yourself to recognize ironic or sarcastic language widens the contexts in which you can reasonably comprehend your target language. Engaging with a wide variety of listening material, from news segments to documentaries to podcasts, will help you train in this area.
Rhetorical Devices
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech is known as such because of his repetition of the phrase “I have a dream.” In English, this rhetorical device (called anaphora) is used for emphasis in both speech and writing. However, your target language likely has different rhetorical devices that function in alternate ways or appear in specific contexts. Learning to recognize these when you hear them will earn your listening proficiency a new distinction.
Nuance
Consider the English words house and home. Both have the same practical definition, and a sentence’s meaning wouldn’t alter much if you switched one with the other. Yet the connotations and associations around each word are wildly different. A house describes the building itself, while a home is a place in which one is emotionally invested and feels comfortable. Using house or home might not change the literal meaning, but it will change how the message is received.
The same applies to your target language. Being able to understand the meaning is a notable achievement, but grasping the nuance between words and sentence structures takes your listening ability to the next professional level.
How Can ICA Help You?
In all, what separates a professional merely able to understand their target language from someone who is a fully immersed, participating listener is a grasp of the ways we express meaning and tone outside of the words themselves.
Notably, this isn’t to say that advanced listeners pick up on everything all the time. ILR and ACTFL guidelines also designate the ability to fill in inevitable comprehension gaps with context clues and body language as a marker of proficiency.
All of these skills can be built with in-person practice and regular exposure to varied audio and video input in your target language. ICA has decades of experience helping our students achieve their language goals in every area, including listening.
Learn more about how ICA can help you improve your listening proficiency or prepare for your next proficiency assessment here.