Improving your listening skills

Of the four linguistic skills the most difficult to practise and improve is probably the listening skill, especially if you are not in a full-immersion environment.

In a context where a language is spoken and continuously used, you are consciously or unconsciously exposed to it from different sources and listen to it all the time, even if you are not directly engaging in a conversation. If you are learning a language in a classroom context or on your own, the amount of audible information you will be exposed to will be far more limited and it will take you longer to attune your ear to the sounds of the language, to learn how to segment sound chunks, and consequently understand what it is said. However, listening exercises in a structured, non -full-immersion situation also have their advantages. The first and obvious one is that, while communication in real life cannot usually be re-played, you can play a recorded track or video again and again, listening for the sense of a whole text or for single words. Also, in many listening exercises you can work with a script and this helps you associating spelling to sounds in the language you are learning, as these correspondences may differ among languages.

Students are often keen on devoting additional time to listening exercises also outside the classroom, but sometimes do not know what materials to use. An important aspect to take into consideration is pace. My personal advice, if you are planning individual study listening sessions, is that you focus on authentic materials, or materials where speakers are likely to talk at the pace of a real-life conversation. Also at beginners level, if you get used to a pace which is too slow, you will be likely to have comprehension difficulties later on.

Secondly, especially at the start, it is useful to use materials you can re-play and, possibly, for which you have a script (to use in the final stage of the listening exercise in order to check single-word comprehension and new words). The internet provides a huge source of these materials, and all you need is some time to search them and select the ones which work for you. You can watch short clips on youtube or listen to songs for which lyrics are provided. If you like watching films, you can easily buy Italian ones on the internet and play them in Italian with Italian subtitles. Finally, as you become more and more competent, a very effective exercise to do is to watch in the foreign language and without subtitles a film you already know very well in your mother tongue.