The Perfectionist Listener
Have you ever missed the entire point of a conversation because of one word?
One key way that learners sabotage their ability to understand what they’re hearing is to try to listen to each individual word.
One student that I worked with struggled with this. We’d listen to an audio, and I’d ask him to summarize what he understood. He’d painfully admit that he wasn’t able to because he had gotten stuck on one bit of unknown vocabulary back at the beginning of the audio.
Instead of continuing to listen for what he did understand, he fixated on that one bit he didn’t understand.
He was listening under the assumption that he needed to understand every individual word. This meant that when he encountered a new word, his brain started freaking out. And then he missed the rest of what was being said.
The cost of perfectionist listening
In a business setting, getting stuck on that unknown word can make you appear incompetent.
When you’ve missed the main idea of the conversation, your only option is to say, “Could you repeat that?” and risk them repeating that unknown word again.
But with the main idea, you’re able to demonstrate your competence by saying, “Let me see if I understood correctly…” and summarizing what you did understand.
Native listening is not perfect either
Even in our native language, there are times when we get distracted and miss certain words or parts of the conversation. But, we know how to continue listening and pick up on the main ideas.
The problem is that we forget to apply this same technique to our learned language.
Listening is a complex skill. It’s not just about hearing every individual word.
To listen better in English, you have to get comfortable with not consciously processing every individual word.
It’s time to get comfortable with ambiguity.
This means:
working with partial information until you can clarify it
getting better at predicting what you’re going to hear
using the context to infer meaning
Skilled listeners don’t focus on hearing every word. They just keep going when they don’t.
If you’d like to learn more about how to do this in your regular listening practice, I’ll be speaking at the British Council’s ELT Week Peru on Friday, March 13th at 10 am, Peru time (EST). I’ll be giving you a more effective method to help you practice listening on your own.
Yes, sometimes this happened to me 🌷.