Listening and Speaking Skills
Listening and speaking skills are vital language skills to develop when learning English or any other language. By having strong listening skills, you will be able to understand everything that is happening around you.
By having good speaking skills you will be able to say everything you want without any problem. This will open up the world of communication both professionally and socially.
Improving your listening and speaking skills
Listening and speaking are two of the four language skills. The other two language skills are reading and writing.
Some people find they can speak well but can’t understand when someone speaks back to them. Others find that listening to others feels easier than creating their own sentences in English.
Read on to learn more about speaking and listening in English and how to improve both skills and have easier conversations with native English speakers.
English listening skills
Listening skills are passive language skills, that is, they are used to understand another other person’s production of language (their speech).
Native English speakers can seem to talk very quickly to a non-native English person. The spaces between words are not visible like they are in written text, so the sounds jumble up together to form one long incoherent sentence.
It takes a while of patient listening practice before a non-native English speaker can discern between different sounds which make up individual words. This helps the non-native speaker to hear where one word ends and another begins.
The spaces between words are often not audible, so you need to know what to listen for in order to separate the sounds of speech. This comes with practice.
Listening skills in action
Listening is a vital skill to develop for university students, as they need to use listening skills in lectures in order to understand the discussion and take notes.
In order to develop good listening skills it is important to help tune your ear into the sounds of the English language. This helps you to pick out individual words and sentences more easily.
Listening regularly to English radio and watching English TV can really help to get used to the sounds of English so that you are more able to focus and understand English speakers in your own life, whether in a lecture or in a shop.
Even if you don’t understand everything you hear on the radio or TV, the simple act of listening to the sounds of English helps to tune your ear into the rhythms of the language.
This will make producing the sounds yourself that much easier once you are able to create your own sentences. This is why listening and speaking skills are so strongly linked in language learning – one skill will necessarily help the other.
English speaking skills
Speaking is an active skill in language learning. English speaking skills are often the hardest to develop out of all the language skills. This is often simply because learners do not always have much opportunity to speak English, unless they are already living in an English-speaking country.
Speaking a new language can be especially difficult if the sounds in the English language are not the same as in your native language.
Some languages never use certain sounds that are regularly found in English, such as the ‘r’ sound, the ‘v’ sound or the ‘th’ sound.
Difficult sounds in English – cheats to help pronunciation
It is possible to speak English without enunciating these more difficult sounds as you can use ‘cheats’ to avoid them.
For example, some non-native speakers use the ‘s’ sound instead of the ‘th’ sound, or the ‘w’ sound instead of the ‘r’ sound.
But in avoiding the difficult sounds and using other sounds instead, some native speakers might find it hard to understand you perfectly. This will be frustrating for you when you’re trying to communicate.
When starting out, using ‘cheats’ is fine while you get to grips with English. But as you become more advanced in your language skills, it’s always best to attempt to voice the letters as closely to a native speaker as possible.
It really makes sense to try to master all of the sounds of the English language in order to be fully understood by natives. Normally, this will simply mean lots of practice in order to train your mouth and tongue to make these new shapes more smoothly.
One way of practising the more difficult sounds of the English language is to try some English tongue twisters.
Tongue twisters are short rhymes or phrases that are difficult to pronounce for native speakers. If you can get your tongue around these fun exercises you will certainly be able to formulate regular sentences easily in the future!
Our Language Guide contains a pronunciation (phonology) section which explains methods of overcoming pronunciation difficulties with English, including advice on rhythm, syllables, stress and intonation.
Read more about using English listening and speaking skills in our Language Guide.
Share your thoughts on speaking and listening skills
Do you find speaking the most difficult skill to learn?
What do you find most difficult about speaking English?
Do you have any advice for speaking practice?
How do you practise your listening skills?
Which sounds in the English language do you find most difficult when speaking and listening? Do you use any ‘cheats’?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments box.