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WHY IS LISTENING IN ENGLISH DIFFICULT?

Do you feel that listening in English is difficult? If your answer is "Yes," why do you think that is? In other words, what makes listening in English difficult for many of us? Before trying to answer these questions, let me tell you that you are not alone! We all feel the same. So do not worry if you feel that listening in English is difficult. I will help you improve your listening skills.

Some causes that have been identified as making listening in English difficult include:

• When listening, we tend to try to understand every word.

• We often get left behind trying to work out what a previous word meant.

• We fail to know which the most important words are.

• Even when we knew a word, we fail to recognize it as it is spoken; in other words, we fail to recognize the words we already know.

• Sometimes we have problems with different accents.

• We lack listening stamina or we get tired.

• We have a mental block.

• We are distracted by background noise.

• We cannot cope with not having images.

• We have hearing problems.

(source: http://www.usingenglish.com/articles/why-your-students-have-problems-with-listening-comprehension.html)

When listening, it is obvious that we do not need to listen to every word spoken (some words cannot be heard anyway when they are spoken by a native speaker.) Only important words do we need to listen to. Important words in English are usually pronounced with stress. (We will talk about this later.)

As indicated above also, although we have a lot of vocabulary items in our memory, it does not necessarily mean that our listening skills automatically improve. Your understanding of any spoken words totally depends on how correctly you learned those words. This is why learning new vocabulary items in the correct way is crucial, too. (We will also talk about this later.)

Listening involves physical and psychological processes. There may be physical and psychological barriers, too. Both these factors need to be attended to if we want to be good listeners. Physically and psychologically we have to be prepared to listen. This means that we need to be fit and should be able to concentrate fully in order to understand better. However, we also need to be ready to anticipate and overcome any physical and psychological problems that may prevent us from understanding well.

Finally, to improve our listening comprehension, we need to familiarize ourselves with as many different English accents as possible. English is spoken in different parts of the world. Naturally, we will find it spoken with different accents. Unless we are familiar with these different accents, we may find it difficult to understand them.

Obviously there is a lot to do in order to become a good, effective listener, but if you are determined to be so, I can help you by showing you the way. Just be ready for the adventure! It is going to be hard work but it is fun!

Suko