How to improve your listening skills

1. Listen to English every day. In order to do this, you should find material that interests you. For example, if you like baseball, watch Major League matches on satellite or cable television - or via the Internet.

2. Do not try to translate what you hear into Japanese.

3. Do not expect to understand every single word. Try to understand the main points, and use your knowledge of the context to guess.

4. If you lack confidence in your listening abilities, start with material designed for learners of English (tapes or radio/TV programmes), and read the text as you listen. Voice of America is a radio service sponsored by the U.S. government. Its programmes present a pro-US point of view, as one would expect. If you want to listen to very slow English, its "Learning English (Special English)" broadcasts are ideal. You can listen to the broadcasts on the Internet and the text is also available. (NHK also has some good radio programs.)

Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab offers graded listening pieces with pre-listening exercises and quizzes to check your comprehension.

5. Record TV programs which are available in both Japanese and English, for example films or Major League baseball games. (In newspaper TV columns they normally have a 二sign for 二か国語.) Listen to them first in Japanese and then in English. Listen to the same program several times.

6. If you want to listen to British accents, the "Listen and Watch" section of the British Council Learn English site contains a variety of listening material. There is also the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)'s Learning English site, which has lots of material of different kinds.

The BBC World Service website provides access to radio broadcasts. It also has a pocasting service. In addition, it has an archive of documentaries.. Short videos of the news can be seen on the BBC News site.

7. For listening material on Economics, see section 3 of my English links page.

You could also try:
The World Radio Network, which will allow you to listen to radio broadcasts from a variety of regions throughout the world (mainly in English). You can practise your listening skills and also see how the news of the day is selected and interpreted in different parts of the world.

For poets reading their own poetry, try the Poetry Archive.

listeningtowords is "a collection of links to free online lectures and courses".


8. Another English teacher in the Faculty of Economics, Professor Kiyomi Matsuoka, recommends "shadowing." Click here to read her advice.