A student arrived in my class last winter with a horrible cold. Pale skin, bloodshot eyes, blocked nose, the lot.

I asked him if he was alright, and he said he was just a little ill.

I said, “get well soon!”, and he thanked me.

As soon as he thanked me, I asked him to repeat what I had just said to him. He paused for a moment before eventually replying, “Erm, I don’t know”.

He continued, “Well, I know what you said, but I don’t know how you said it”.

He said it in Spanish (que te mejores) to show that he understood the sentence, but he could not say the exact words I’d used. Not one word. Even though he understood me perfectly.

I do this all the time. For you teachers reading this, try it. When you see that your students understand a sentence that you say, ask them to repeat it word for word.

Nine times out of ten, they won’t be able to.

It’s a little bit cruel, but it demonstrates a very important point.

Humans are really bad listeners. We have very selective hearing.

The human brain hears what it wants to hear.[thrive_leads id=’1049′]

I spent a whole two hours recently calling one of my students David. It wouldn’t have been a problem, except that his name was actually Javier.

I realised near the end of the class, and apologised saying, “Sorry Javier, I’ve been calling you David for the last two hours!”.

He replied, “Really? I didn’t realise”.

Two hours calling him by a different name, and he didn’t even realise.

You may be able to hear well, but that doesn’t mean you can listen well.

Let’s look at the science behind this strange effect for a moment.

In face-to-face conversation, the words that you use aren’t that important.

Most of what you understand when a person is speaking to you, you get from the context, eye contact, intonation, body language, and word and sentence stress.

You can see this in action when you are in a country trying to communicate, but you don’t know the language.

What do you do? You exaggerate all of these things.

And often, you manage to get your point across.

These things are the true international language that everybody understands. You can see that words are not that important in everyday communication.

But! When you’re learning a language, words are THE most important thing.

So why does the brain prioritise these things over words?

The answer is in energy consumption…

The human brain represents just 2% of total body weight. It’s pretty small in the grand scheme of things.

But it consumes 20% of all the energy produced by the body, and uses 25% of the body’s oxygen.

That’s one very hungry little organ.

As with anything that uses a lot of energy, efficiency is a top priority. And so, the brain is obsessed with saving energy. It tries to use as little energy as possible.

How can the brain save energy in a conversation?

By listening to less, by processing fewer words, and by using more energy-efficient processes.

Observing body language, listening to intonation, and understanding the context require far less energy than listening to and processing every word you hear.

So the brain puts more emphasis on those things, and listens to less.

So it listens to the subject and object, the verbs, the nouns, the adjectives, and not much else.

This is all that is needed to understand what the person is talking about.

The brain doesn’t process verb tenses, prepositions, many adverbs, auxiliary verbs, and all the other smaller details of the language.

The thing is, these are precisely the things that English learners make the most mistakes with!

The brain listens for the general understanding, and ignores the specific.

It’s important to understand that the brain may hear those words, but it doesn’t process them. That means it will forget them very quickly. Almost instantly.

It’s like RAM memory on a computer. It remembers things ONLY for the time needed to complete the task. Then it is all deleted. All the important stuff is on the hard drive. But that’s what you should be using when practising English.

This is the logical thing for the brain to do.

Why work more when you can work less and get the same result.

However, this is a bad thing when you’re learning another language. Listening is when you most learn, and if you’re only processing half of what you hear, you stop learning from listening.

And then your progress goes flat.

Unfortunately, standard English teaching focusses on getting the general understanding from listening practice. And most of the listening practice that learners do on their own is also listening for general understanding.

If you practise listening for general understanding, you will get good at listening for the general understanding.

Nothing more.

Listening in this way will not improve your listening skills. It’s not what you practise, it’s how you practise. Your brain is already good at listening for general understanding. It’s what it does best. You don’t need to practise it.

Your brain is not good at listening in detail. So that’s what you need to practise.

There’s one exercise that puts an end to this problem: dictation.

I could write about dictations all day. They’re great.

Dictations force the brain out of its comfort zone, and make it listen to and process every word it hears.

When you do dictations in your own language, you’re practising spelling. And they’re boring. When you do dictations in another language, it’s a completely different exercise.

Here’s how you do it.

Go to www.ted.com and choose a video that you think you’ll find interesting. Take one minute of speech from the video. Listen to the first five or ten seconds and write down every word you hear. Repeat those few seconds again and write down anything you missed. You can repeat as many times as you like, it doesn’t matter.

Then listen to the following five seconds and write every word you hear.

It’s important to write down every word. If you don’t hear the word, simply write down what you hear. Write down the sound you hear, and it may help you identify the word later when you check.

When you’ve done one minute of dialogue, listen to the whole thing without pausing.

So now you have your written dictation; now comes the second exercise.

Now you need to look at what you’ve written, think about what you’ve written, and analyse the language in the sentences that you’ve written.

Do the sentences make sense? Are they in the correct tense and follow the correct structure? Are the correct prepositions there? Plurals? -ed verb endings?

These are some of the things that you may not have heard, but by looking at what you’ve written, you can correct mistakes you’ve made and identify missing words.

When you’re done, then you need to check what you’ve written.

Next to the video, click on transcript. Here, you can see every word the speaker said in the presentation.

Make any corrections in red and save all the dictations you do in chronological order. As you look through them over a few months, you’ll see a clear reduction in the amount of red colour in your dictations.

Do this two or three times a week; it takes fifteen minutes.

After six months, you’ll be a machine.

I was made to do dictations at school in France when I didn’t know the language. My first finished dictations were blank pieces of paper. Slowly, as my French improved, I started hearing more and more.

After one year, I was getting the best marks in the class. Better than the French kids in the class.

I was getting the best marks in the class precisely because it wasn’t my first language.

When you do dictations regularly, you start to hear things that most people don’t.

You become a listening machine.

Seriously, if you do dictations three times a week, in six months your life will be completely different.

You’ll be much better at English, more attractive, you’ll earn more money…everything will improve.

Well…maybe not everything in your life, but they are really very good.[thrive_leads id=’1049′]