Learning to listen to English-FITA Lesson 2
Listening to English, even before reading or writing, is key to achieving an advanced level of English. That’s why this course is based on listening to English.
So let’s get more specific about what listening means and how to listen.
There are two ways of listening to a foreign language:
- Paying a lot of attention to details. As your capacity to pay attention is limited – especially if your English level is not too high – you can only do this for a limited amount of time: 1, 2, or 5 minutes maximum. This is called Active Listening.
- Letting the language flow into your ears without paying attention to details. This is what you do naturally almost all the time. This is called Passive Listening.
Listening will help you pronounce and speak correctly. But how should you do it correctly and effectively?
These are the steps you should follow to increase your level of English through listening:
1) When you start listening, begin by listening carefully for ONLY 1 to 3 minutes
The rest of the time you don’t need to pay so much attention. Just let the language flow into your ears.
Listening carefully means trying to memorise and learn the structures that you are listening to.
For example: If you listen to this paragraph:
“The studio was filled with the intense smell of roses, and when the gentle summer wind moved through the trees in the garden, the strong essence of lilac entered the room.”
You should listen to the same paragraph over and over again until all the sounds and structures become familiar.
Let’s see how you should memorise the sounds and the structures:
-The studio was filled- Sounds something like this “dé sstúdio wuáss fild”. Listen to it and think about the sounds you’ve heard.
It is NOT “de estudio wuas filEd”. This is what you say when you are not really paying attention to what you’re listening to.
As I said in Lesson 1, the mind is like a runaway horse; when you listen to this paragraph you will automatically hear the sounds that your “Spanish mind” tells you to hear unless you do it slowly, PAY MORE ATTENTION and repeat the sentence several times.
2) You have to learn to make the new sentences yours
This means that you’ll repeat them so often they won’t sound unfamiliar anymore.
Becoming familiar with a sentence means that the sentence sounds natural to you and you can visualise the situation in the same way you do it in Spanish when someone says something to you.
So when you hear, “The studio was filled with the intense smell of roses”, you actually see the studio and you smell the roses.
To get to this degree of familiarity with the sentences, you should listen and repeat aloud what you have just heard one, two, three or a hundred times.
3) First, listen two or three times to the recording, then read the transcript
Reading without listening can be very dangerous for your pronunciation. That’s why it’s important to ALWAYS listen first.
The more you can listen without reading, the better.
Think about the following fact:
Children spend almost 5 or 6 years of their life listening and speaking their own language before they start learning to read. That’s why they never make pronunciation mistakes.
If you had done the same in English when you were a child, you wouldn’t make any pronunciation mistakes now.
So remember that it is very important to listen to English without reading at the beginning.
4) Pay close attention to the differences between the spelling and the sound when you read the transcript
Most of the problems related to listening and speaking have to do with not concentrating on the difference between the spelling and the sound of the word.
So if you read:
- In the middle of the room, on an easel-
You should listen carefully to the sound of each word:
- middle /ˈmɪdl/
- room /rʊm/
(closing your lips to say the letter “m” at the end)
- easel /ˈiːzl/ the “s” is pronounced with certain vibration. That’s why in phonetics is represented by a “z”. It’s not: /esel/
And to the sound of the entire sentence as a whole.
- In the middle of the room, on an easel- sounds something like this: /in the mídl óf dé rúm, ón ánissel
What to listen to
This course is based on listening to a graded bilingual audiobook called “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. We’ll go into detail on how to listen to it in the following lessons.
However, this is NOT the only material I want you to listen to during this course.
You can listen to all the English you want any time and any place.
Please, use your mobile phone, tablet, computer, television, radio, or any other similar devices to listen to as much English as you can all throughout the day.
Take a look at the table below which contains recordings of different levels and degrees of difficulty.
You should move between these levels.
First Month
Note: Remember to listen very carefully for only a few minutes at the beginning. Try to remember the sounds, structures and meaning.
Second Month
Day |
Beginner/Low Int. |
Inter-Upper Int. |
Advanced |
Mondays |
Big brother is watching you (Listen one chapter every Monday) |
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Tuesdays |
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Wednesdays |
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Thursdays |
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Fridays |
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Saturdays |
70-year old proves it’s never too late |
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Sundays |
Choose one episode every Sunday
|
Note: Remember to listen very carefully for only a few minutes at the beginning. Try to remember the sounds, structures and meaning.
Quiz Lesson 2
1) What is the difference between active and passive listening?
a) In active listening you don’t pay attention to details, in passive listening you do.
b) In active listening you pay attention to details, in passive listening you don’t
c) In active listening you do other activities apart from listening, in passive listening you just listen
d) In active listening you underline some words, in passive listening you don’t
2) When you start listening you should:
a) Listen to everything
b) Listen about 30 minutes
c) Listen to only 1 to 3 minutes
d) Listen whatever you feel like listening to
3) “Make the new sentences yours” means:
a) You write them on a piece of paper
b) You read them aloud a couple of times
c) You repeat them so often that they won’t sound unfamiliar any longer
d) You make a sentence yours
4) Why is it important to listen and then read?
a) Because if you read first you will never learn to pronounce correctly
b) It’s not important
c) To test your capacity to understand English
d) It’s more interesting
5) What should you do after you listen to a recording?
a) Try to write it down
b) Nothing.
c) Pay attention to the new words
d) Pay attention to the difference between the spelling and the sound of the words
10 comentarios
Saludos,
Quiero aprender ingles y buscando un podcast, me encontré con el de ustedes, me encanta. Estoy comenzando hoy, pero todo lo que visto, me gusta mucho. Así que ya les ire contando de los avances
Gracias.
Hola Maribel: Me alegro mucho de que te gusta y espero que te sirva. Muchas gracias por el feedback y esperamos saber de tus progresos. Saludos
Ayudaaaa que está mal en la siguiente oración?…..
because the people don’t find the wrong word in this sentence
Fernanda: Tengo que saber el contexto, pero debería ser:
“because people don’t find the wrong word in this sentence”. No es “THE” people, porque estás hablando de la gente en general, no de un tipo de gente. Espero haberte ayudado. Saludos, Mónica
Hola Mónica,
Gracias por hacer que el curso FITA esté al alcance de todos lo que tenemos el inglés como “pendiente”. Decidí mejorar mi nivel de inglés – hablarlo fluidamente sin temor – y tú curso tiene información de gran utilidad para mí. Empecé hace una mes y sigo tus consejos al pie de la letra. Te comentaré a medida que vaya avanzando!
Muchas gracias:)
Genial! Me encantará saber sobre tu progreso.
Un abrazo
Buenos días Mónica, estoy interesado en seguir vuestro curso, pero me gustaría saber si se complementa con algo más que lo que indicáis en el blog. Sé que existe un grupo de Facebook y hoy mientras realizaba el test de nivel puede ver un formulario que básicamente era para crear un programa a medida de cada estudiante o eso me pareció a mí. Le escribo aquí porque les envié un mensaje por Facebook y no he recibido respuesta. Entiendo que no soy la única persona que les escribe, pero me gustaría que me explicase como funciona este curso, en cuanto a actividades a realizar. Gracias.
Pd: He visto el video de introducción que hizo en español.
Hola Salva:
Acabo de ver tu comentario. Aquí tienes el grupo de Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/192584441181383
El FITA es un curso que era de pago, pero que no pudimos mantener tras el COVID. Ahora lo estoy subiendo gratuitamente cada semana (más o menos) Consta de 26 lecciones, con vídeo, audiolibro (https://blogdelingles.com/index-audiobook-the-picture-of-dorian-gray-level-4/), pdfs, grupo de Facebook y explicaciones.Puedes preguntarnos lo que desees en el grupo de Facebook, o por correo. Este es el índice del Curso: https://blogdelingles.com/fita-course/ Hemos subido ya 14 lecciones. Cualquier duda, nos dices. Muchas gracias por tu interés. Saludos, Mónica
Hola Mónica! He empezado hoy este curso. Tras leer la introducción me pareció justo lo que yo necesitaba! Estoy muy motivada para romper definitivamente la barrera del nivel intermedio. Pero me surgen algunas dudas sobre si lo estoy haciendo bien. Mi plan es cada día hacer una lección, veo el video, luego leo la lección sobretodo fijándome si hay algo que no saliera en el video y si hay algo “que hacer” lo hago (solo he llegado a la lesson 3) y pensaba además cada día ponerme al menos 1 audio de los que salen en la tabla de mes de la lesson 2. ¿Es así como debe seguirse? Gracias por todo el trabajo y ponerlo en abierto, es una maravilla y muy generoso!!
Hola Lucía: Me alegra que te sirva. Sí, es correcto cómo lo planteas, solo que hay lecciones que no podrás hacer en un día. La misma lesson 3, sobre pronunciación es demasiada información para asimilar en un día. Yo creo que puede llevarte un par de semanas haciendo 10 minutos diarios cada día. Lo más importante es escuchar e intentar hablar en voz alta para repetir los sonidos. Al final, la rapidez con que lo hagas depende de tu capacidad de memorizar. La mayoría de los alumnos tienen una “memoria promedio” y debe practicar cada día para que se le queden las nuevas palabras y estructuras.
Puedes también hacerme preguntas en el Grupo de Facebook.https://www.facebook.com/groups/192584441181383
Si tienes más dudas, pregunta. Un abrazo Mónica