Getting used to different accents in listening practice

A recording can be perfectly clear and still feel like a blur, simply because the voice is not one you hear every day. You may meet a range of English accents in the test, and I am not going to guess which ones. What you can control is how many different voices your ear has already met.

Why an unfamiliar accent feels fast

Accents differ in far more than vowels. They differ in stress, in where speakers pause, in how words run together and which syllables get swallowed. A voice that sounds slow and tidy to one listener can sound like a train to another, because the second listener's ear is tuned to different patterns. Tuning comes from repetition, so a little often beats a lot once.

Listen cold, then with the text

Choose a news item or podcast clip of two or three minutes from a speaker you rarely hear. Radio and podcasts from different countries are easy to find online, and interviews with people who learned English as a second language are useful too. News is a gentle place to start, because newsreaders speak clearly and steadily. Move on to interviews and conversations when you are ready, because people there interrupt, speed up and run their words together.

1. Listen once with no subtitles and no transcript. Write down three things you caught.
2. Play it again with subtitles or the transcript, and mark every place you missed or misheard. A published transcript is safer than automatic subtitles, which make mistakes of their own.
3. Ask why for each miss: an unknown word, an unfamiliar sound, or simply speed.

A log entry might look like this:

Entries like this are worth keeping, because each one names a pattern you can listen for next time.

Shadow the stress and intonation

Shadowing means speaking along with a recording, about half a second behind the speaker, and copying more than the words. Copy which words are loud and long, where the voice rises and falls, and where it pauses. Try it on 20 to 30 seconds at a time. You cannot copy what you cannot hear, so shadowing forces you to notice details that ordinary listening skips.

Put stress and intonation first and individual sounds second. Stress shows you which words carry the meaning, and the movement of the voice marks the edges of phrases, which is how you find the edges of ideas. Then listen for three things that make fast speech hard in any accent:

• Linking: "pick it up" can sound like one long word.
• Weak forms: small words such as "of", "to" and "and" shrink to almost nothing when they are unstressed.
• Dropped sounds: in "next day", the middle sound often disappears.

Once you know to expect them, they stop sounding like mistakes.

When you meet a word you do not know

Keep going. The recording does not stop, and the cost of one missed word is small next to the cost of falling behind. Where you are typing, type your best guess by sound. Where you are taking notes, write a question mark and move on, because the meaning of the sentence often comes back a moment later. After the practice session, look the word up and add it to your vocabulary list.

A weekly schedule: three sessions of fifteen minutes

1. Session one: a clip from a speaker who is new to you. Listen cold twice, write what you caught, then check the transcript and mark the misses.
2. Session two: the same clip. Shadow the clearest 30 seconds three times, then play five sentences one at a time and type each as dictation.
3. Session three: a different speaker. Listen cold once, write what you caught, check the transcript, and compare the number of misses with session one.

Change the speaker each week. When you take a practice test, note which recordings felt hardest and add similar voices to the following week. Two other posts help with the pieces: Write from Dictation: how to catch more words for the typing step, and headset, microphone and a quiet place to practise, because any accent is harder through poor speakers. You can try the listening tasks in the practice tests on this site.