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Writer's pictureFrank Doogan

Precise listening skills build fluency. Watch the video here or read the blog.

Updated: Jun 6



In previous videos and blogs we have identified the importance of exact recall of what you hear as the necessary data for becoming fully fluent.


We have identified that paying attention to overall meaning is good and useful, but to develop high level fluency you need to pay very close attention to what it is that you're hearing – the data.

If what you are not hearing is word endings/small grammatical words/unstressed prepositions/contractions of auxiliary verbs etc. the language data that your brain is using to generate your own language model is false.


When you have that false model it takes a large amount of training to undo it.


Some traditional exercise in this area was the practice of dictation, and this was good because it tried to train listening skills.


The major flaw it had was teachers and audios used strange and over-emphasised voice in the dictation, and these did not present the normal language of fast speech and did not provide an accurate fluency model.


Listening to natural-speed audios and transcribing what you hear and doing that again, and again before you check it with a fully authentic transcript will go some way to improving your fluency.


This may improve your awareness of words and the word parts you are hearing, and this will boost your grammatical and vocabulary awareness, but it will not resolve how natural your voice sound is, your choice of speed in parts of your speaking, your choice of the words that you stress in a lexical chunk, and how adequately you link words as you speak them.


If you would like some expert hand-holding in building your fluency, please contact us at

service@myittutor.org or +852 92791395

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