Hello! It’s Kristine here with the Express to Impress podcast. This episode is part two of How to Improve Your Listening Skills with Movies With Cara Leopold. If you haven’t listened to the previous episode, I recommend you check it out before listening to this one. In this episode, my guest Cara talks about effective and, most importantly, fun ways to learn the English language or any other language.
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Now, let’s jump back into our conversation.
Understanding Different English Dialects
Kristine
People speak English differently depending on where they live. The speaking speed can be faster, or they can talk more, like using more words. And where I live, compared to other regions, we speak at a more measured pace, not as fast as some regions. We don’t speak as much as some other regions. So many people have told me they have an easier time understanding me than their colleagues, depending on where they’re living. So any thoughts on what it takes to adjust to all of these differences in speaking patterns and speaking speed?
Cara
This is where we can take more of a listening training approach. In terms of the accents or speakers that you find more difficult, there’s actually a really cool website. It’s called the International Dialects of English Archive, or IDEA for short. And it has a massive collection of recordings from people all over the world who speak English. Dialects from the US and the UK, and also a very broad range of other accents. So people speak English for who English isn’t their first language, et cetera. I’m articulating this badly because I don’t want to say non-native speakers every single time, but you know what I mean. There’s this massive archive of accents, and it’s the same format for most speakers. They read aloud a passage; that’s like something written that they read out. And then, there’s a phonetic or phonemic analysis of the features of their accent.
In the second part, they speak more spontaneously on a topic. And, the site actually has some micro listening tasks, as we call it, where you listen to a short section of what those people said, and you try to write it out. Well, you’ve got the phonetic or phonemic transcript, and then you’ve also got just the written transcript of what they said. So that’s really cool for testing yourself. But you’d have to test yourself on the spontaneous part because, in the first part, everybody reads the same text. So it’s not very difficult to test yourself. The second part is more interesting because the language is more spontaneous. It’s going to be a bit faster and a bit messier.
That’s a really cool site to train for understanding specific accents. And I think this also just comes down to exposure. So obviously, some accents will be easier to understand than others. There’s not necessarily an inherent feature or features that make one easier than the other. I think sometimes that just comes down to familiarity with it. So depending on what materials you’ve been taught with, et cetera, and sometimes accent differences, they often just come down to a few key sounds. Like r sounds are a big one. Or even my name, like you were asking me about in the beginning. Do you pronounce it Cara or Cera? And, there, we’ve got some differences on the vowels and the r sound. But, other than that, sometimes the biggest difference between the varieties of English is they’re not as big as we think.
And actually, the issue is more about the way that people reduce sounds and link them together when they talk fast. That is actually the biggest issue across all accents of English. Everybody does that. And it doesn’t really matter if they pronounce the r the American way or the British way. They’re still going to take shortcuts when they speak fast, and they’re going to modify words, drop words, drop sounds, modify the sounds. And that’s what we should be more focused on.
So that’s why it’s interesting to do the types of “micro listening”–the trendy word teachers might use. Dictations, listening, and writing, whatever you want to call it. But these are the kinds of tasks where you raise your awareness of how English sounds. Not so much from a sort of individual phoneme sound point of view, but more like, “okay, when these words are all spoken together, how do they actually sound? What happens to them?” And you can develop that awareness by listening and then writing and working with very short sections.
The Importance of Reductions and Linking
Kristine
Absolutely. Well, I can’t wait to check out that website. I have never heard of it. So, thank you for sharing that with the listeners. And I couldn’t agree more about learning how the language is actually spoken with those reductions and linking.
I frequently use Rachel’s English videos with my clients or refer them to her videos. She has just so many available that are useful and fun. And my clients definitely are relieved whenever they find them. They’re like, oh, my gosh! It unlocks the language. And they realize that they were going to be stuck until they learned how the language was actually spoken and be able to start to recognize when they hear all these words. They’re like, “I don’t know these words.” But then, when they realize the way we reduce words, they feel like, okay, I can start to understand people now that I know this. One of her series that I love is the 100 Most Common Words in American English. She explains how they are really pronounced, and she shares sentences so you can hear them in context, and most of them are reduced.
Cara
Yeah, this is the weird thing for people. The hardest words are often the simplest words in the sense that they’re the words that you’ve known since you started learning English. So the auxiliary verbs, the conjunctions, the prepositions, et cetera, et cetera.
And even at advanced levels, they still cause people problems because they’re the most frequent words. Obviously, the words that we say the most, we also transform the most. And also, they tend not to be the most important in terms of conveying meaning. So they tend to get reduced more than other words. Although any type of word really could be reduced when we’re speaking fast. So those ones are really crucial. I think people would be really surprised by that because I think people think that, If I can’t understand, it’s because these words must be new, and they must be difficult and complicated words that I don’t know. I don’t have enough vocabulary.” And actually,
the irony is that it’s usually the words that you already know that cause the most problems.
And then this has implications for learning things like phrasal verbs. Phrasal verbs are extra hard to learn because prepositions and adverbs don’t tend to be emphasized when we speak fast. So, therefore, it’s even hard to identify the phrasal verbs if you’re just listening. Or this could make picking up new expressions or idioms or whatever it is more difficult because you don’t catch all the parts of the expression or all the parts of the idiom because maybe there are some articles in there or some other grammatical words that are hard to catch and therefore it sounds fuzzier and more unclear. I do think actually not understanding also has implications for learning vocabulary and also grammar because if you can’t hear the grammatical words, then it’s very hard to know when to use them.
Getting Motivated to Learn the English Language
Kristine
Absolutely. So another issue I have faced is reluctant language learners. Certainly, I meet motivated people who love learning languages. But I also meet people who are learning a language because it’s a requirement to get into a university or get a job they want or some other goal they have, but they really don’t enjoy learning English. They don’t seem to care about making mistakes, or they’re not really curious about it. They just want to get good enough to get the job done. Does that make sense?
Cara
Yes, that makes total sense.
Kristine
And I feel for them because I can see they’re reluctant and frustrated by some of the processes and haven’t really accepted that this is really going to improve their lives. So what would you recommend for someone in that situation on how to improve their listening skills when they really don’t enjoy language learning?
Cara
Yeah, I think this is a big problem with English.
People resent it (the English language), and I understand that because it’s imposed on a lot of people, and obviously, we can’t expect everyone to be excited about learning it. So I totally understand those feelings, which are valid. I think then, if you can’t get excited about English, what can you get excited about? What interests you, in general?
I mentioned at the beginning that I worked with movies. It’s more interesting to do micro-listening tasks when you’re working on a quote from a movie that you love or you’re working on some dialogue that you really want to understand because you really like the movie. What I’m getting at here is what kind of content would be interesting for you to consume in English? The internet is an Englishman. There are other languages that are becoming more and more important out there. But there’s so much content in English. There must be something that would motivate you to learn. There must be something that, beyond the fact that it’s in English, you want to know more about or learn more about anyway. Because in the case of a movie, the story is interesting. That’s a reason to watch it, beyond the fact that it’s in English.
So it’s trying to find that thing, whatever it is, whether it’s books or podcasts or TV shows. I talked to someone the other day who reads technical documentation in English, someone in the IT industry. I mean, it could be anything because everything works. So as long as it motivates you, then I think that’s the key. I think motivation is really underrated because if you find something motivating, you will want to read it or listen to it and understand it, no matter what, no matter how hard it is. I would start there. Think about your interests and then apply that to English.
Jumpstarting Your Stalled Language Learning
Kristine
Yeah, that’s great advice for language learning in general; focusing on materials that are interesting to you and won’t feel like a chore to you.
So I have clients and students who, as I mentioned, moved to the US. They meet a lot of those initial goals, and they’re struggling, but they accept that this is part of the journey, and they’re hopeful that their English is just going to get better. Then they come to me five years or ten years after moving to the US. And they say their English has been stalled for a long time. And they’re surprised, they’re disappointed. Sometimes even their kids speak better English than them. And their kids pick on them or tease them or tell them to work on their accents, and it can be humiliating. And they had this idea that if they just got to the US, immersed in the language, surely they would become fluent. How would you recommend they jump-start their English listening learning again?
Cara
Yeah, that’s interesting because that is something that happens when people move abroad. And it just goes to show it’s not as simple as just moving. It’s not the solution to everything. And yeah, I’ve had that after arriving in France. Sometimes you end up having the same conversation over and over again. You go into a shop, you’re buying bread, and you say, “bonjour, merci, au revoir.” Obviously, if you’re just at the very beginning stages, you need to repeat these conversations. But after a while, it’s not very helpful. Or the conversation about you’re not French. “Where are you from? Why are you here?” This kind of thing. Once you’ve done it once, you will have to keep doing it again if you live in a country where you’re not originally from. But it gets very repetitive very quickly.
So I think the question is, how do you break out of these repetitive situations that you’ve mastered, probably, at this stage, and how do you go off and do something else? I think something that’s helped me at this stage is I’ve done quite a lot of different things in French. I’ve worked in a French company, and I’ve studied. Also, I’ve been to university. I’ve been involved in activism locally. I’ve done things that pushed me out of that everyday comfort zone. So mix up your routine and try different things. Because, again, if you’ve got kids and then they come home, and then I don’t know if people are talking to them in a different language or in English or whatever, but yeah, kids, what did you do at school today? I mean, again, it’s very repetitive, so it’s sort of breaking out of that.
Also, I think something that can happen is that if you get good at listening for the gist, I mean, this is a skill, I suppose, being able to catch the meaning of something without understanding every single word. But I think if you get too good at that and you can’t make out individual words, and you can’t get all the details, then that is also something that can keep you stuck. So I think that’s why it’s interesting to focus on listening skills and to become more aware of what you’re missing by doing tasks like listening to short sections, writing out what you hear, and then checking with a transcript or subtitles or whatever, just to become more aware of what you’re missing and what you could possibly improve.
And then you can also–I get my students to do this–we record lines of dialogue from movies that we’ve worked on, and the goal isn’t to pronounce it perfectly, but it’s just to be aware of how native speakers say these lines, what they’re doing to the words, which sounds they’re reducing or blending together. So that can be an interesting thing to start doing. I say that it’s less a pronunciation exercise and more of a listening one, but it will obviously have an impact on your pronunciation.
I think mixing up your routine is good, also. Reading can be really powerful for the reasons we’ve talked about because many small grammatical words are hard to catch in listening. If you actually read them and you see them on the page, I think that reinforces grammatical knowledge better. So if you speak a language that doesn’t use articles–and we said articles are hard to catch in speech– if you see them in writing, that’s probably going to be more useful for reinforcing when we use them.
Joining a Movie Club to Expand Your English Language Skills
Kristine
Absolutely, yeah. I think, as you said, it’s easy to get comfortable communicating in certain areas. So a person might get very comfortable communicating in business settings. But then, the moment they’re in a social setting and the topics are unpredictable and might be completely new for them, they may feel vulnerable. So you want to get exposure to talking about different topics, and yeah, films and books are a way to expand your vocabulary. But I think even better–discussing books or films with people to then practice that language–can reinforce some of that.
Cara
Exactly. Yeah, that’s one of the reasons we have a movie club that we do with our students. I was reflecting the other day on some of the topics that have come up over the last couple of years, and we’ve really covered a massive spectrum of topics where if I went into a lesson and I said, okay, today we’re going to talk about body positivity or the meaning of life. I mean, some movies do actually cover quite deep life philosophy, but in a funny way, and you don’t really realize it until you start analyzing them. So we have covered a really wide range of topics and not just the usual small talk.
That could be another situation people get stuck on. “Hi, how’s it going? What’s the weather like?” It’s breaking out of that. The familiarity is good, but if you’ve mastered one area, go and have a look at another area because there’s always room to expand, isn’t there? There’s always something you haven’t mastered. There’s always more to learn. It’s always true in a language.
Kristine
Well, I love the concept of your movie club. It sounds like a wonderful way to learn and discuss and expand vocabulary and listening and speaking skills. So, I love learning about that. All right, I have another question here. I’m curious. Have you seen listening problems with English language learners that stem from the way they learned the language? Perhaps they put a lot of effort into learning the language, but they still have significant listening and speaking challenges. If you’ve encountered that, what are some of the problems in English teaching methods in classrooms that create those problems?
Problems With Language Teaching in the Classroom
Cara
Yeah, I think that’s true for so many people. Unless they’re one of these people who grew up watching Friends in their bedroom as a teenager, and they got really good at listening through that. For most people, it is a struggle. And I think for us as well. We’ve learned foreign languages, and I remember the listening part wasn’t taught very well. It was just literally like practicing for the exam. And it was sort of like multiple-choice questions. And I always found it very stressful. There was never really any useful advice. It was just like, here, listen to this tape. Answer these random questions. Pick A, B, or C, so you can literally just guess.
And then we didn’t even do stuff like look at the transcript. In addition to answering the questions, we could have looked at the transcript, and they could have been like, hey, look, here’s where they put a bit of a trap to make you answer B when the answer was actually C. They used the same word, but they used it in a different expression. We never even had the most basic level of sort of analysis.
And for me, that’s absolutely indispensable to look at transcripts and actually look, well, what was in this listening that made it hard? What was the problem? Was it new words? Was it words that you already know? We’ve already said that those tend to cause the most problems. What was going on here? Or is it just like, is there some language here that actually you haven’t learned yet? So these people were speaking in the conditional, and you don’t actually know that. That’s another reason why you might not understand something. You actually haven’t learned it. So that’s another problem. And there was never analysis, and also not very focused on pronunciation. So I think a lot of people don’t have a good awareness of how written letters should sound.
Kristine
Yeah, you brought up so many great points, and these issues have come up in my own language-learning journey and in many of my students and clients. And there are long-lasting impacts and repercussions.
For many people, when they seek out a teacher, they ultimately need to undo some of the learning that they’ve had. And learn to listen; learn to speak the language in the way it’s really spoken. Just learn the basics of English as a language of contrast. With our intonation, there’s a big contrast; our volume goes up and down, our intonation goes up and down. We have moments of speaking and of pauses, we have reductions, we have moments we speak very clearly. And it’s that contrast that allows us to gather meaning from the language. And without that contrast, it can sound very boring to our ears. Or it might be hard to distinguish what is important and what the person is saying.
So I really wish some of these basic features of the English language were taught in all classrooms where people are learning English because there’s so much time and effort put into it. And yet some of these basic, vital things to be able to listen well and speak well are missing in the classroom.
Cara
I think the big issue is sort of treating writing and speech the same way and assuming that there’ll be a transfer over from sort of teaching through reading and writing to speaking and listening. But actually, they need to be treated for what they are, which is two separate modes of communication with their own logic and rules, et cetera.
About Cara’s Movie Club for English Language Learning
Kristine
Absolutely. So you touched a little bit on the training that you provide to students. You talked about your movie club. Can you tell me more about what you do to help people develop their listening skills?
Cara
Yeah, so the club is really about helping people watch movies in a way that’s then useful for their own English; for their own listening skills and speaking skills improvement. Because I think, a lot of us think, okay, well, let’s just watch a movie in English, and that will help me learn the language, and that will be a good two-hour immersion in English. I’ll come away having learned more expressions and having learned about the culture. And the reality is it doesn’t quite work out that way for various reasons. Often movies are hard to understand. That two-hour window of immersion is pretty long. And then I’ve found people don’t know what to do. They don’t really know what expressions to learn, or they get overwhelmed, or they try to write down too many. And then there’s the issue of reading the movie if you’re using subtitles.
There are all kinds of things that end up spoiling that experience. So, in the movie club, we’re trying to create a space where you actually watch a movie and then learn something and then use it because you’re discussing it with other people. And I think the most powerful thing about it is having this group of people from different parts of the world who all bring their own interpretation to the movie.
So we spend a month watching a movie. That’s very different, I think, to help or watch it by themselves. We take some time to watch it, discuss it, read and watch other things about it, like reviews. Then we take some time to work on speaking and listening skills using clips from the movie, so that’s the chance to actually go into more depth, which is something that most people don’t usually have the chance to do when they just watch the movie once. So it’s hard to repeat an entire movie, but you can watch a clip more than once, and you can understand it really thoroughly, and then we also have discussions.
So I think that’s the most powerful part, when you actually start analyzing it and talking about it, and also listening to other people and hearing what they thought about the movie and their interpretation. And it’s always really cool to hear about what my students have noticed because often, they pick up on things that I just haven’t noticed at all. And as I said, it’s totally different from the usual small talk you might have in a typical English class where you’re always talking about the same things. Like I said, we’ve talked about a really surprising range of topics.
Kristine
It sounds so wonderful. I wish I could join it. I wish you offered the movie club in Spanish and Portuguese, which are the languages I’m always learning. But I really appreciate you sharing about the movie club with the Express to Impress listeners. And I imagine many of them will be interested in checking it out.
About Language TV Club for Expanding Your Language Skills
Cara
Well, we’ll see. They’re always welcome to join. I actually know someone who runs a language TV club where she offers various languages like Spanish and Portuguese. But it’s based on TV series. I interviewed her for my YouTube channel, so that could be a possibility for you. But, yeah, I’d love to see more teachers, more teachers of English and also other languages run their own movie clubs because it is such a fun way to learn and to practice the language. And we also need more variety of clubs. We watch certain movies, but I don’t know, I don’t like superhero movies, but maybe somebody could start a superhero-themed movie club. I’m sure there would be a space for that–to discuss movies like that.
Kristine
Yea, absolutely! Well, Cara, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing your knowledge and passion for language learning and English listening skills with the listeners. You shared so many helpful resources, and I’ll be in touch to get the name of the TV Series. Actually, why don’t you share it with the listeners?
Cara
Yeah, there’s the Language TV Club. I’m sure you’ll be able to find it just by typing that in. Yeah, it should come up. I think there’s only one called that so far. Like I say, we need more.
Kristine
Yeah, absolutely. All right, Cara, well, thank you again.
Cara
Great. Thank you so much for having me, Kristine. And thanks, everybody, for listening.
Continuing Your English Language Learning
That brings us to the end of the second and final episode about building great listening skills in the English language (or any language, for that matter) with Cara Leopold! I hope you enjoyed our conversation as much as I did! Next time, I invite you to tune in to learn definitions for the idioms and phrases covered in these past two episodes.
Thank you so much for listening to the Express to Impress podcast. If you found this episode helpful, please remember to share it with a friend! See you next time. Bye!
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