Well, listening skills are relatively tough to attain! For this, you need to practice for a considerably long time. But thanks to the technology that its difficulty levels can be minimized through present day available sources
To excel in this, you must make a strategy with best tips and tricks that make your success easier and closer.
What is the best way to start?
Yet, if you are already a good listener, you need to practice as per the requirements of the respective examination. It is to note, when you start practicing for the listening section, don’t be hasty to start with more complex recordings.
Always start with what you are comfortable with. Maintain progression in your skill which you could also feel while reviewing yourself. Steady practice will take you to the best level.
What should you work on?
This question will drive you towards the authenticity of accents. You should remember that during the listening test, you have speakers talking in a variety of accents.
One more thing, ‘what you write is different from what you listen to’. Keep in mind that in the listening test, you deal with sounds but not scripts. And hence you should master pronunciations. You should be able to understand all pronunciation styles of the countries where English is the primary mode of communication.
And such ‘pronunciation’, we call an ‘Accent’ and that is what you have to perfect.
What is the correct way to work on your listening skills?
Well! To find the correct way is nothing but understanding your own progress. And, to observe your progress, it is required to constantly question yourself with some essential parameters. By questioning and analyzing yourself, you will gradually understand how productive is your response to the audio recording and your overall performance with respect to the time (time limits in the PTE examination).
Here are the questions that you require to answer yourself to get the best out of yourself. The questions we provide you below are truly helpful to understand and review your own performance. It is to remember, whenever you practice with a recording for the first time, you should focus on self-analysis.
After you listened for the first time, ask:
- Did I understand the main idea and supporting ideas of the recording?
- What is the accent used by the speaker?
- What is the context of the audio clip and the information conveyed?
- Are there any words new to me (vocabulary)?
After answering the audio clip, ask: