How to improve your listening score

[teacherdominic]

Hi there. Here's a brief article to help you improve your listening score by thinking about spelling. Not perhaps a sexy topic, but it can be a very necessary one for many IELTS candidates.

Firstly, spelling does matters. It's a sad fact that you can do the listening part perfectly well, but you don't get any cigar if you fail the writing part by misspelling the answer. Often candidates miss up to 6 points this way and that can mean a whole band score. Disaster.

So if spelling matters, how can you improve it? Contrary to what you may think, there are definite techniques and skills involved here; it is not just a question of learning to spell. Here are 10 top tips:

Tip 1 – Know the problem

First of all, if you can’t spell, you’re not (necessarily) an idiot. English spelling is horrible for one very good reason – what we say and what we write are often two very different things.

So, step number one in my programme is to not to think too much about how the word sounds when you write it. It’s important to make this connection because in many languages what you say and what you write are the same thing. As English is different, you need to think in a different way when you spell in English.

Tip 2 – Learn to look at words

The next tip may sound strange, but it is key. It is to learn to look at words, see them as pictures. As I say this may sound weird, but it does work. Some of the best spellers of English are speakers of Asian languages which use pictures or ideograms instead of letters. They tend to spell well in English because they see words as pictures.

Here’s what you do:

look at the word and take a picture of it
use your eyes as if they were a digital camera
zoom in on it
focus carefully
click
close your eyes and see the word in your head
now ask yourself what the third letter of the word is
what’s the second last letter?
how about the fifth letter?
A miracle! It works. Told you so. The point is to think with your eyes and not your ears. The really, really good news, however, is that once you start to do this, once you have looked at 200 words or so in this way, the process becomes almost automatic. What happens is that your brain changes channel and learns to “see” words and not just hear them.

One excellent site to help you with this is "BBC Skillswise Look, say, cover, write and check". The words it focusses on are elementary, but it is excellent for learning the skill. An alternative is "lookcover", which uses the same approach but also allows you to type in your words to test.

Tip 3 – Write words down
To me this is obvious: spelling is writing. Therefore if you want to learn how to spell a word, you need to write it down. Curiously, this is something that many learners miss.

Tip 4 – test yourself
Again, this may sound obvious, but it’s something many people miss. Repetition is an important part of language learning: typically, to learn how to use a word properly you need to use it around 6 times. I would suggest that the same applies to spelling – once you have spelled a word correctly 4-5 times, then it is learned.

How do you test yourself? One old fashioned way is to write the words you want to learn down one side of a piece of paper. Fold the paper over and write the translation down the other side. Look at the translation: can you remember the word? Can you spell it?

Tip 5 – Look for spelling patterns
English spelling may look random, but there is at least logic to it. This logic is found in spelling patterns or combinations of letters that are repeated fro word to word. Most of you will be familiar with “-ation“, so let’s look at one you may not have thought about – “ture”. Look at these words

future
culture
furniture
picture
lecture
They sound much the same and are the spelled the same way.

Now let’s suppose you hear the word “architecture” in the listening; you know it’s the word you need, but you have never written it before. Can you spell it? On a good day, yes. Many low level books introduce the word “architect” , so you ight be able to guess this much:

architec

Now, all that remains is to guess the “cher” sound is in fact the “ture” spelling which you know from other words. I would emphasise that this will be a guess, as “cher” does have other spellings in English. But now at least you have a chance.

"lookcover" is a good place to start here as it organises words by sound and spelling.

Tip 6 – Think grammar
This leads me onto the next related step. grammar and spelling are connected. A suggestion is to notice common endings for nouns, verbs and adjectives. There will be some guesswork involved here, but it can help to be aware that “ence” is a very common way for nouns to end.

If you focus on this, you will be able to avoid misspelling “difference” as “differents”. A really common problem that can be avoided this way is the “to” “too” “two” issue.

Tip 7- Don’t learn everything- focus on key vocabulary
The dictionary is a big book and you can’t possibly read it all. Still less can you learn to spell all the words. A good resource here is the General Service Word List or the Academic Word List, as they contain the words you are most likely to want to use in IELTS.

Another simple suggestion is to keep a list of words you commonly misspell and focus on these first.

Tip 8 – Read as much as you can
In my experience, the best spellers are people who read lots. The idea is that if you read and read, you simply become used to “seeing” the right spelling of a word without having learned it.

Tip 9 – Use the computer
I hate Microsoft, but it can help you. If you turn spellcheck on when you use a computer, you get corrected when you misspell. It’s not perfect, but it will help you identify some errors anyway.

Tip 10 – Learn to check – with your pencil
Lastly, but by no means least: check your spelling. Once you’ve written, go back and read it again. Spelling should always be on your personal error correction list. I would only add that this works best if you have a written/mental list of those words you personally get wrong.

Another small point is that you check with your pen/pencil in your hand: that way you are much more likely to see the mistakes. If you just read with your eye, you tend to see what you expect to see and so do not find the mistakes.

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Dominic Cole
Dominic Cole's IELTS Blog