How to improve your TOEFL listening skills

In addition to the reasons such as not knowing words or difficulty concentrating, the lack of accurate pronunciation ability may also be an important reason for the delay in hearing improvement.

1. Two common manifestations of insufficient sound discrimination

1. Inability to hear some words affects local comprehension

The first manifestation of poor pronunciation is that some words cannot be heard accurately.

Sometimes students will come across some words that they know and read when they appear in the book, but as soon as they hear them, they are blinded, or they hear other words, or they don't hear what they are.

The downside effect of this situation is that the test taker will not be able to understand a certain passage of the listening material correctly, and if there is a question about this passage in the subsequent questions, the test taker will not be able to answer it well.

2. It is too late to react to the information and interfere with the overall grasp

Another problem that can be caused by a lack of pronunciation is the lack of time to react.

From hearing the content to reacting to the meaning of the content, it is a process of receiving and understanding information, and the length of this process depends on everyone's ability to distinguish sounds.

Some people may be able to realize what is being said immediately when they hear something, while others may need to be stunned for a moment to react, and for the latter, this slow reaction speed can interfere with the overall grasp of the listening material.

TOEFL is not slow to speak, and the amount of information is large, and one or two or three omissions are enough to affect the overall answer to the question. It can be seen that this problem caused by insufficient pronunciation ability is very serious.

2. Two ways to improve the ability to distinguish sounds

1. Grasp the vocabulary through intensive listening

I believe that everyone should be familiar with intensive listening training, and many students may be practicing.

For the improvement of pronunciation ability, reasonable intensive listening training is very helpful.

In fact, many words are just unfamiliar with their pronunciation, not completely unfamiliar. Therefore, it is only necessary to associate the spelling meaning of the word with the pronunciation, so that there will be no more inaccurate hearing, and it is undoubtedly quite appropriate to want to do this.

Immediately after listening to it, look up the dictionary to deepen your memory of the meaning of these words;

After that, repeat this many times until there are no new words that you don't understand, and it is best to be able to understand each word accurately without reading the text.

Through this training method, everyone's pronunciation accuracy can gradually reach the required level of the TOEFL listening test.

2. Combine dictation to improve reaction speed

If you want to improve your reaction speed, you can train with dictation exercises.

For example, when listening to a conversation, the content that needs to be recorded includes: the main content of the conversation, problems, solutions, etc., and the details should be as perfect as possible, so that you can train your reaction speed to the greatest extent.

Students who have poor pronunciation ability in the early stage may miss many details and even some important points, but with continuous training, everyone's listening and pronunciation response speed will become faster and faster, and even gradually develop a certain ability to predict.

And when the test taker can effortlessly record the entire conversation or lecture information, then the TOEFL listening problem can be solved effortlessly!

1.Mastery of high-frequency words.

There are not many high-frequency words in listening, and there is no shortcut to memorizing words. When it comes to listening words, the most important thing is to pay attention to pronunciation. Whether it is a word book or a new word that appears in the TPO, pay attention to the accumulation, and read it aloud when reciting, rather than just looking at the appearance of the words.

Of course, it is also important to pay attention to the continuous consolidation of revision, if you do not review regularly, the energy and time spent before will be wasted, which is a pity.

丨2Familiarity with the listening test site.

It is important to have an understanding of some common test points and essay structures for dialogues and lectures, because it is becoming more and more difficult to listen to texts nowadays, so it is normal for an article to be unable to fully understand it. And in the exam, almost everyone will encounter situations such as missing hearing, hearing clearly, etc. At this time, it is especially important to grasp the test signal words of each sentence or each group.

It can help you pay attention to the missing part of the information, grasp the follow-up points, and even answer directly, so as to achieve twice the result with half the effort.

丨3Training with a large number of past papers.

I believe that everyone must be familiar with this matter of brushing TPO, and now TPO has come out to 50 sets, and some of them are used for practice. Don't start the mode of frenzied brushing questions too early, just start with one set a week, beginners can start from the first set of TPO, each set of TPO must be done completely, and it is particularly important to concentrate, so that you can enter the exam mode relatively quickly.

1.Word. In the TOEFL listening test, many students only focus on test skills when preparing for the new TOEFL test, but neglect the mastery and understanding of TOEFL listening vocabulary.

Words are the basic part of TOEFL listening, and only when the vocabulary reaches a certain level can the obstacles to TOEFL listening can be reduced and a high listening score can be achieved. Although the new TOEFL listening vocabulary is very large, the TOFEL test is not difficult. Professional vocabulary directly determines whether listening can be understood or not, so it is necessary to accumulate a certain amount of professional vocabulary in the process of preparing for the exam.

2.Phonology. Pronunciation is also a matter of attention in TOEFL listening.

In order to improve pronunciation, it is necessary to pay attention to the choice of materials and the differences between voices. The best way to solve this problem is to read along, imitate, and try to familiarize yourself with the content** and source of the TOEFL listening material. There are ways to do this, a reads well, B reads while listening, and C only listens and doesn't read.

In short, only by choosing the right materials, mastering the methods, and constantly practicing can we achieve the improvement of sound recognition ability.

3.Questions. TOEFL listening consists of two parts: a conversation and a lecture.

If you want to get a good score, you must know what question types are in these two parts, or how to take the test? Lectures and conversations also have their own characteristics, which we need to know in advance. The most valuable information is selected from the characteristics of listening and lectures, which is the key to our questions, so students can figure out the structure of lectures and dialogues, the content of the examination, and grasp the key points at the initial stage of exam preparation.

4.Note. If you want to achieve a high score in listening, you must take notes.

Note-taking requires students to be able to jot down key information from the recording, including nouns, verbs, and other expressions. Grasp the overall structure of the essay and listen to the sentences in the structure; Pay attention to the author's purpose, attitude, several sub-arguments, and tone of voice at the point of progression or inflection. Note-taking is to help us record more details and help us do problems, so we must learn to take notes efficiently.

1. The core is to improve the "sense of hearing". The only way to improve your listening skills quickly is to keep practicing + summarizing. ETS has a routine for asking questions, don't panic if you don't understand some places, it's the most important thing to hear the question point.

2. Learn to do intensive listening exercises. Step breakdown: Listen to the general idea for the first time, and take as many notes as you can.

Supplemental notes for the second pass. Listen to a sentence for the third time, stop a sentence, try to record it word for word, if the whole sentence is more difficult, listen to the record half a sentence and half a sentence, and then gradually increase the length. The fourth time, listen and compare the text you have written, and read along.

Don't be lazy at every step of the way! At the beginning of the practice, it may take an hour or more to complete an essay of a few minutes, but once you have a certain amount of time to accumulate, you will find that it is becoming more and more relaxed, and you may only need to pay extra attention to some small details such as vocabulary, continuous reading, etc.

3. Learn to take better notes. First, it is better to listen to the main thing, and to remember it as a supplement, and the notes are just to let us remember faster and better when we remember the short circuit, so we must remember what we can understand! Second, there is never any best method, only the most suitable method for oneself, and the most suitable method for oneself must be summed up from a large number of exercises and practical experience, otherwise it is all on paper.

Thirdly, I want to improve my writing speed, which will be mentioned in the writing section later, hand speed is really a good thing!

4. Learn to listen to the key points and mark the key points. Learning to listen to the key points is to grasp the point of the question. Pay special attention to the sentences after each inflection and conjunction, which are often the starting points.

5. Learn to summarize the gist of the listening material. It is important to pay attention to the expression of the beginning and end sentences, as well as the ideas and reasons for the different points of view. Only by summarizing the article more can you find out this routine.

I usually use the New Oriental Super Energy to learn and listen carefully over and over again:

step1.Listen carefully to the text at least three times, paying attention to continuous reading, stress, intonation, weak reading, and abbreviation (these phonetic phenomena are described in detail in the annex), and for these areas, do a mouth-shaped silent reading exercise.

step2.Try to read the listening material at the same pace as the text, and you may not be able to keep up at first, but try to keep up, at least some of the pronunciation phenomena that you focus on in Step 1.

step3.Read and read and read

step4.Listen to the text again and listen to the material many times, compare some differences between yourself and the original pronunciation, what you have learned and what you will pay attention to in the future.

The main problem solved by following reading is actually "word discrimination + meaning comprehension + pronunciation correction". Because there is a very important theory: if you can say it, you can hear it, and explain the meaning of reading from this perspective.

But in fact, outsiders in Guangdong will find that they can understand the local vernacular of Guangdong, that is, Cantonese, but they can't speak it. This also shows that it is not necessary to say it in order to understand.

But we also have to interpret and read from another angle, that is, in fact, the reason why many test takers can't hear it is because they have problems with pronunciation. For example, Cantonese has 7 sounds, but Mandarin only has 4 sounds, and many northerners say that Cantonese pronunciation is inaccurate, because after adulthood, because our ability to distinguish sounds has not been used for a long time, and it has degenerated, so we can't recognize other sounds well, and this reason is caused.

This problem can actually be corrected by a large number of follow-ups. Of course, in the early stage, it is best to find someone to correct your pronunciation, which will have the effect of getting twice the result with half the effort. When we pronounce the sound ourselves, that is, the recognition of the sound is accurate, we can judge the content we hear well, in fact, reading also has this effect.

When you prepare for the TOEFL listening test, you must practice more and make TOEFL listening your advantage. Happy learning!