There are so many good websites to practise your English listening skills. As an English language teacher, I have my favourites and I often ask my students what they are using. Personally, I’d divide these listening websites into two different categories; passive listening practice and active listening practice.

I define passive listening as an activity where you are listening to something in English without any exercises to test what you understand. This could be listening to an English podcast, listening to an English radio station online, listening to English songs on spotify, watching English TV programs without subtitles, or just listening to English conversations being held around you. This style of exercise is incredibly important. It’s similar to what we did as babies. We listened for at least the first 2 years of our lives before we started speaking.  So, I encourage my students to always have the radio or podcasts playing while they drive, are at home or while on public transport. Even when you are not completely focused on learning English, your brain is still hearing the ‘sounds’ of English. This includes accents, intonation, and sentence stress.

However, the only downside of passive listening activities is that you never really know how much English you actually understood. Take me for example. As I've mentioned in previous blogs (click here to read it), I’m a Spanish language student and I constantly listen to Spanish songs. I even sing along with these songs. I think I understand them perfectly and my vocabulary and grammar are exactly what the singer is using. However, often when I google search the lyrics to my favourite songs, I am surprised to learn that I was singing the wrong words and definitely the wrong grammar.

Therefore, I think it is also incredibly important to do active listening practice. I define this as listening to something on purpose and with an exercise that will test how much you understood. The exercise I mentioned above of listening to songs and reading the lyrics is an active exercise. Your ears, eyes and mouth (if you are singing at the same time) are all working together in English. You could also do this technique with TEDtalks. Firstly, listen to the TED talk and take notes. Secondly, listen again and read the subtitles. Thirdly, compare your notes to the subtitles. To be honest with you here, I much prefer to listen to TEDx talks. They are shorter and I don’t lose interest in the topic as fast.

One of my favourite websites is esl-lab.com. It has a lot of listenings and they are separated into easy, intermediate, and difficult English language levels. There are also academic listenings for students thinking about taking an English language test. It has multiple choice questions for each listening and transcripts so you can read and listen to the recording. If you are interested in watching a short video of how I would use this website to get the most benefit, click here. If you would prefer to listen to my video like a podcast, click here for the audio file only.

To sum up, I personally think we benefit most from study when it is active learning. However, the reality is that sometimes we are tired, sometimes we are bored, and sometimes we really don’t want to study English. It’s in times like these that passive learning is our best friend. So, the next time you are driving, or on public transport, or cleaning your house, make the most of this time and practise your listening in whatever format that works for you.

Have a great day!

Happy listening!