Method 1. Don't choose materials with more technical terms and proper nouns.
Most students don't need to master technical terms and other difficult and uncommon words, which can be ignored in practice. However, if there are many such things in the selected materials, it will undoubtedly set up many unnecessary obstacles for yourself and affect the fluency of practice, which should be avoided.
Method two. Pay attention to the timeliness of paragraph materials. The stronger the timeliness, the more worth practicing.
Dictation of outdated English vocabulary is not appropriate. For example, the beautiful English prose written by some famous writers is good in literary talent, but it may have been written more than 100 years ago. Some words used may be out of use in modern English, or they are difficult to understand. This kind of material is only suitable for simple appreciation, which is far from students' usual use of English, and it is not suitable for practicing dictation because it is not aimed at the exams they face.
Method three. If you have a poor foundation, don't practice dictation with dialogue in film and television dramas.
This kind of material may contain too many spoken words or idioms, and it is very fast, which is very difficult for students whose English level is not solid and their dictation ability needs to be improved, let alone dictation. For most students who are facing CET-4 and CET-6 (courses), film and television dramas can be used as listening and speaking practice materials, but only if they don't dictate directly, first use Chinese subtitles to understand the general idea, and then use them as extensive listening materials to practice their sense of language simply by listening, so as to get used to authentic English pronunciation and intonation and correct their mouth shape. At the same time, listening can deepen memory and learn some oral expressions in the play.
Method four. At the beginning of practice, the material length should not be too long.
Too long space can easily lead to excessive fatigue and make practitioners lose interest. It is more appropriate to start with simple and short materials, step by step, and constantly realize your progress and sense of accomplishment. With the deepening of practice, you can gradually come into contact with long materials.
Method five. Listening to radio programs for dictation practice is not recommended.
This is because the content on the radio cannot be repeated. If you don't understand it the first time, you can't listen to it again and do circular exercises. Moreover, there is no recorded English content on the radio, which means that you can't answer the questions after listening to them, which is of little help to improve your ability. It is recommended to use tapes or MP3 materials, so that you can listen to them repeatedly as needed, and the selected materials must be accompanied by audio recordings.
Extended reading: how to improve English listening quickly
Step 1: Listen extensively and increase your hearing.
Extensive listening refers not only to a wide range of topics, but also to listening in a state of inattention. The purpose of this is to "grind your ears" and increase your hearing. You can keep your hearing while doing other things. There is a skill in doing this kind of extensive listening, that is, you can listen to it several times first, then understand the main idea of the text, and listen to it several times more, which can effectively increase the effect of extensive listening. In addition, the topics of listening materials must be diversified, including not only news listening, such as VOA and BBC, but also economic listening, such as the Economicst, and life listening, such as Crazy English.
In short, we must be familiar with various subjects and choose materials with different difficulty gradients for training. Several English listening websites recommended are Coco English, Big Ear English and Pute English Listening Network. The materials in it are very rich, such as listening to literary masterpieces, classical prose poems, practical English listening and so on. Students can browse these websites instead of collecting texts on various topics everywhere.
Step 2: Listen carefully and analyze the structure.
Extensive listening is the foundation and intensive listening is the house. Only by laying a good foundation can a tall building be built.
The purpose of intensive listening is to understand the general structure of English articles and the thinking of Americans. This is very effective for us to master English listening.
First, you should choose a high-quality text, such as a voa listening, then you can listen to it completely for several times to understand its general meaning, and then listen carefully sentence by sentence to find out the relationship between sentences, such as causality, transfer and so on.
For example, in general, English news broadcast will talk about the general content and then report the details of the event, while for economic listening, the topic generally appears at the beginning of each paragraph. After many times of such analysis, you can have a general understanding of the general structure of English, and we can also keep up with any crisis in listening comprehension. In addition, I recommend a very good listening tool, that is YY. It has Pute English Listening Network and Big Ear Channel. You can listen with many people and urge yourself effectively.
Step 3: concentrate on attacking words.
The importance of words is well known. Words are also an obstacle that must be overcome if you want to do a good job in English listening.
First of all, you can summarize and recite common words, such as listening vocabulary summarized above the forum, TEM-8 vocabulary and so on. There is also the need to classify and recite vocabulary. In the stage of intensive listening, we can sum up the words we can't know, copy them in the notebook and recite them every day, so that we can master the words we meet in English listening one by one over time. What is recommended here is the new word memory function of Youdao Dictionary. When you search for the meaning of new words, you will be reminded to add new words to the vocabulary, and then review them at fixed points every day. This function is very beneficial to our homework listening vocabulary. In fact, most of the words we meet in listening are commonly used words. The number of new words is limited. As long as we can master a limited number of new words, we can easily do listening.
Improving our listening ability can enhance our self-confidence, make us top in the exam, and make us feel at home in the actual English conversation. Listening level also reflects a person's English level. Especially for translators, being able to understand the text plays a vital role.
Three steps can effectively help students overcome difficulties in listening learning, turn weaknesses into advantages, conquer English listening and become English listening experts!