How to Practice Listening

Tired of answering endless comprehension questions and still struggling to understand what people are saying? Try this!

In March, I had the honor of speaking at the British Council’s ELT Week Peru.

I spoke about my HEAR method for helping English learners to practice listening.

The HEAR method is:

Hypothesize

Explain

Analyze

Respond

It’s flexible enough to work with a variety of audio & video material, it doesn’t require teacher-created materials, and learners can do it on their own (with a little help from AI.)

I go into more detail about each of the steps (about 30 minutes) here.

If you’d like to try this out, I have a list of 10 recommended video & audio collections that I’ve used with my own students.

This presentation was mainly for teachers, but if you’re an English learner, you can still use the steps on your own. If you’d like a more detailed walkthrough of each step, I also have a self-study course about my method.

I’m considering opening a group course here on Substack for learners who want more listening practice. We’d follow my method for a video each week and meet to talk about what we’re learning once a month.