An Effective Strategy to advance your PTE Listening skill

Besides Reading, Listening is another way to input new knowledge, vocabulary, and so on into our minds. Students cannot write or speak much about particular topics if they don’t have enough vocabulary and knowledge, especially when taking an English proficiency test.  

If English learners want to take English proficiency tests in the time to come, most English proficiency tests assess test-takers skills based on Reading, Listening, Writing, and Speaking. The Pearson Test of English is no exception to what we call Communicative Skills. No matter what English tests students take, we always advise them to focus more on their general English skills rather than spending 100% of their time learning the test format and question types. 

Get yourself ready and explore this unique strategy.

Step 1: Choose suitable content

There are three types of content that all English learners face, including Easy, Difficult, and Just-right content. Our job is to pick the Just-right content for study and avoid the rest.

• Easy content: We call it easy if students understand video or audio content from 90%. At this range of comprehension, students get almost content, so it doesn’t have much left for improvement. As a result, it’s better to pass this type.
• Difficult content: In contrast to easy content, if students cannot understand 70%, it’s in this type. Difficult content is challenging and students only understand less than 70%. We also avoid this type as it’s time-consuming and inefficient. 
• Just-right content: This is what we are looking for – Just-right content. If students understand from 70% to 90% of the content, it’s good to go because we utilise our current knowledge and vocabulary bank (understand from 70 to 90) to study new vocabulary and ideas (the rest 10 to 30 that we do not understand). 

 So, the question is “How do we find Just-right content?”.  By listening the first time to video or audio content if your gut tells you. Of course, depending on feelings is not always right, but it is the best way we can do for now. By doing that time after time, we gain more experience and make better decisions in the future. If you know other better ways to pick content, please let us know in the comment section.

Here are some sources that English learners can listen to on a daily basis free of charge.

• Oxford Online English and BBC Learning English: Millions of videos provide a wide range of topics that suit all English levels. English learners should pick a short video or audio content, in the beginning, to make sure that they are able to finish it. Otherwise, it would be very demotivating. BBC Learning English has a series of 6-minute English, while Oxford Online English has English Vocabulary Lessons which both are great choices for short content.

• TED Talks and NPR: Harder content is here at your service. If Oxford or BBC Learning English are easy, let’s give these sources a try. Yes, students can also try this out first to see whether they are difficult or not. If these sources suit your level, we have more topics to pick.

Conclusion: Let’s refer to one source first and choose your favourite topic to test. Listen to the video for a couple of minutes to decide whether it’s suitable to listen to the rest or save it for later study. If students think it’s suitable, let’s move on to the next step. Otherwise, we need to find new video content.  

Step 2: Shadowing technique and Notes taking

The profits of the Shadowing technique are undeniable. Doing the Shadowing technique upgrades our Intonation, Pauses, Pace, and Pronunciation. By shadowing, we actually mimic all things Speakers say, which helps us learn how new words are pronounced and used in real contexts. 

But how do we do the shadowing technique? We repeat what speakers say and mirror their intonation, pronunciation, pace and pauses while listening to video content at the same time. 

YouTube videos always have auto-generated subtitles, which is undoubtedly essential to do shadowing. While listening to a YouTube video (or other platforms but it should have subtitles to help students do shadowing), we turn subtitles on and imitate them right after the speakers say anything. By doing so, students learn how to pronounce new words and improve their intonation and pace in addition to new knowledge.  

To illustrate, we learn from this video content: “Flexible Working” – a 6-minute content on the BBC Learning English channel. We also turned on subtitles to do shadowing and took notes of new words at the same time, here are two words we use as examples:

• In terms of
• Turn down 

English learners can take notes on anything they like, but we recommend writing down idioms, collocations, phrases, expressions, or ideas (not single words). BUT DO NOT look up their meanings or pronunciation while listening because it interferes with our Listening process, which does NO good to your advancement. 

Before moving on to the next step, students should listen to the whole video one more time and take notes of words they missed from the first attempt.  

Step 3: Review all words

In this step, we look up meanings and pronunciations of all phrases that we took notes of in Step 2. For example, we had “turn down” and “in terms of”. Let’s look them up in Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries or Cambridge Dictionary, and we have the following results. 

Turn somebody/ something down: This phrasal verb has two meanings

• (1): to reject or refuse to consider an offer, a proposal, etc. or the person who makes it
• (2): to reduce the noise, heat, etc. produced by a piece of equipment by moving its controls

If you already watch the video, you will know for certain that the (1) meaning fits the context.  

In terms of: used to show what aspect of a subject you are talking about or how you are thinking about it.

So from our video sample, “…what the job needs in terms of when, where, how long...” This means that the speaker is considering some aspects such as when, where, and how long while talking about “the job”. Please stop here if you haven’t watched the video yet. It’s truly crucial to watch it before this step.

Your reviewing step is done! Students should follow our step-by-step strategy thoroughly to ensure its efficiency. 

Step 4: Summarise what we hear

This is our step to apply what we have studied into practice, and this is the only way to strengthen knowledge and new vocabulary so we are able to use them in different contexts confidently. Listening and Speaking should go together; as a result, we strongly recommend English learners summarise what they hear verbally. Imagine that we just have a conversation with a friend, and we need to summarise that conversation to make sure we will not forget it in the near future.  

In Step 2, we already took notes on new phrases and ideas, students feel free to use these notes for summarising. Let’s do it now and check our summary later. 

This is our summary: The video clarifies the term “flexible working” in modern society. Besides, it also indicates the disparity of requesting flexible working hours between men and women, which leads to unsatisfied and inefficient working time in the office. To resolve this matter, the speaker recommends some ways that the firms can do to support their male workers.  

Step 5: Listen again and again

Reviewing lessons again and again strengthens our memories and ability to use new ideas, and phrases confidently. After completing Step 4, we need to have a reviewing plan to help us reinforce knowledge time after time. The best strategy is to review the lesson the first time in 3 days, the second time in 7 days, and the third time in 15 days after completing the lesson. The more days pass, the longer time we need to review the lesson again.  

Learning new ideas and phrases is one thing, applying them into practice or using them in actual contexts is another. If only students spend time to practice frequently, they will be able to use new ideas and knowledge effortlessly in the future. Thus, NEVER underestimate your effort put into practice.  

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To remind you, Listening and Reading are the two input skills, English learners are impossible to upgrade their Speaking and Writing if they do not have new knowledge and vocabulary. Hence, it’s truly crucial to boost our Reading and Listening every day, which are ways to gain more knowledge and widen our vocabulary bank. 

To PTE takers who are looking for the Pearson Test of English materials, this is your best live-interactive PTE Practice Platform.

Thousands of practice questions are available besides instantly detailed feedback for all question types, especially Speaking and Writing questions. The PTE Practice Platform evaluates users’ answers based on the same grading elements that Pearson uses to assess test-takers. 

For instance, the following image is instant feedback for a Re-tell Lecture question that we evaluate the user’s answer based on Oral Fluency, Content, and Pronunciation – 100% the same way as Pearson applies to evaluate students’ skills.

For more information, let’s take a look at this video sample feedback for a better understanding. Wait no more, go visit our PTE Practice Platform, create your FREE account and start your preparation today.