How active listening makes you a better speaker

And 5 strategies top learners use to boost their speaking skill

Active listening means listening with a purpose, an “active process of interpreting information and making meaning”.[1] Learning how to listen actively can significantly accelerate language learning process in various ways. Yet this is probably the most neglected area for ESL leaners.

A study[2] conducted among 106 learners studying French as a second language found that the group of learners who were given “explicit instruction on how to listen” turned out to “significantly outperformed” the group of learners who studied listening in a traditional way. In other words, learners who adopted certain strategies when listening acquire much greater comprehension improvement.

In the outperforming group, learners were taught to focus on finding the meaning by applying metacognitive cognitive strategies such as predicting, guessing, linking what are relevant and irrelevant. By doing that, they were able to connect the dots and see the big picture instead of being overwhelmed by unimportant details.

Listening is the most frequently skill used in language. Also, “listening and speaking rely on each other and regulate each other”[3]. In my experience of coaching, by encouraging learners to participate in daily listening tasks, I could make a majority of them speak confidently within less than a month of training. Various reasons might be:

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