audio.
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Listening Practice
To help students improve their listening, I often suggest an exercise known
as the “Movie Technique.” To do this, you need to pick an English-language
movie that you enjoy. Again, pick a fairly easy one, where you will
understand most of the words used.
Begin by watching the first scene. This should take about 3 to 5 minutes.
Turn on the English subtitles. As you go through it, pause if there is a
something you don’t understand. Look up the meaning of the word or phrase
in an idiomatic dictionary. Watch the scene until you know all the words of it
and understand.
The next day, watch the same scene again, several times. Once you
understand the vocabulary, turn off the subtitles. Then watch the scene again,
listening without the subtitles. Do this every day for the next five days or so.
You might spend four or five days on one scene, but that’s okay. Each
repetition improves your English listening ability.
Now watch the scene again, but try pausing after each sentence or phrase.
Repeat the sentence out loud. In fact, don’t just repeat the sentence, act out
the scene. Copy the speech of the actors. Copy their movements, facial
expressions, and emotions. Pretend you are the characters in the scene.
Remember the movie pronunciation exercise? This is another version of it.
This entire movie technique might take you a whole week for just one
scene. When you feel you have mastered the scene, you can start the entire
process again with the next scene. It might take several months to get
through one movie, to really learn it, but that’s the point. The movie
technique is a way to thoroughly learn and master all of the English used in a
film. This method will improve your listening, your fluency, and your
pronunciation. If you just watch a movie once, without using this process,
you get little to no benefit from it.
