Last Updated on October 7, 2023 by Editorial Team
Communication skills often are not just about giving out information. Listening skills form a pivotal attribute too. Only after proper listening and comprehension that a person give out a response appropriately. While the significance of this ability is being outlined, some individuals may observe a call for enhancing these capabilities or may need them to be brushed up for better bonding with people around them.
Even if the learning is compromised, there may exist a need to master hearing skills, and evidently grasping at a personal level is often preferable. For this reason, apps can be an admirable take-in. In this article, we have listed some remarkable choices for you. Before this, it may be fair to comprehend better why listening skills are often eminent.
Listening skill: The ability to build up bonds!
Listening skills are necessary to understand and implement what other people are speaking and suggesting. Not only this, but the ability to pay attention also assists in the following ways:
- Building trust and strong relationships: Listening skills aid in establishing faith amongst teammates and also outside the workspace. It is important to ensure the feeling of being heard which aids the person to rely upon a person and thereby develop trust.
- Prevents miscommunication: Having a good understanding and rapport with your colleagues, classmates, friends, and family members helps you avoid a lot of miscommunication at home, school, and your workplace. However, to build a relationship, listening is extremely crucial. This helps you understand what people wish to convey to you. Moreover, it also helps gather the feelings of another person and their viewpoint.
- Helps to build valuable Insights: People may always embrace learning and active listening as it is powerful in supporting learning how to carry your organization forward. Active listening is essential to planning a strategy or any sort of organizational change. It also assists in analyzing developments in the recent past.
- Empowered leadership: An active attentional ability makes one empowering and also aids in building confidence. It is also beneficial in understanding a leader to know what your organization is in need of and also succors in expanding your perspective and empowering you. It may stipulate that individuals be more aware and more communicative.
- Associative in learning a new language: When we listen to songs from foreign countries, we tend to pick up a few words and include them unconsciously in our daily use. Similar can be the case with interacting with people. When we talk to people from other cultures, we pick up their words and unknowingly learn bits of a new language. All this often happens because of active listening skills.
Apps that can elevate your listening skills
Living in the digital era brought out a number of edges. At the same time, adults or kids can enhance their skills to listen effectively through various tools like games and activities. Accordingly, here are a few apps that can be advantageous if you wish to boost your listening skills and make you a better leader and an individual.
1. English Listening
This light app opens with a white-green-themed simple screen with multiple options like lessons, items, and six levels of listening sessions to choose from.
Created especially for ESL students by the special instructors from TESOL, this free app is a collection of pre-recorded speaking sessions of mentors. These are slow enough for the aspirants to understand better. As the recordings are recorded with specialized equipment, the listeners may expect good quality.
To address the requirements of varying sets of aspirants, the app offers a set of six different types of content to interact with. These are fill-in-the-blanks, picture listening, short passages, quotes, sentence diction, and paragraphs. This diverse set of lessons may retain engagement in users while ensuring it is a worthy listening app.
App link: Playstore
2. Busuu
Being a language learning app, it not only aids with developing and improving listening skills but also speaking, writing, grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary skills.
This application makes it user-friendly as the child or the supervisor can work on their own in listening comprehension by listening to English in various dialects. It also allows the listener to pause, rewind, and listen to a lesson as many times as they want to master their pronunciation.
The app is created in a way to give the learner the freedom to learn in bits and begin from where they left last. Users can also practice and enhance their listening skills with real people and tutors from around the world.
App link: Playstore | Appstore
3. Wannalisn
It might be hard for other speakers around the world to understand and comprehend other English speakers and concentrate on the English subtitles while you watch a show, movie, or even a documentary. This app is supportive of solving the problem of listening comprehension.
There are key differences between the spoken and written forms of the language among the learners of English around the world, which makes it challenging to understand informal English spoken daily by the natives.
This is why an innovative edutaining course has been created in this app to encourage people to learn English faster and use it in daily life. The listening aspect of the app has been advantageous to thousands of users, which fetched this useful application 4 stars on the Google Play Store.
App link: Play Store | App Store
4. FluentU
Being one of the most popular applications to improve the language by enhancing listening skills, this application has a rating of 4.1 stars which makes it a favorite amongst the masses.
The app consists of authentic videos of music, movie trailers, news, and inspiring talk; you can also turn them on into personalized language learning lessons. Helping users understand the tone and context of what is being spoken, the users can also focus on more than one language. The languages available on the application range from Mandarin to English to Japanese and even Russian.
The audio dialogues in the application are great for gathering an understanding of the language. For accessibility, this application is both iOS and Android friendly.
App link: Play Store | App Store
5. VOA News
There are a few applications that aid a user to enhance their listening skills. At the same time, a lot of these focus on teaching the language and uplifting listening skills. But, VOA News is one application that focuses on 3 aspects: improving listening skills, teaching English, and sharing the news of the day!
With a 4.2 star rating, this application has radio podcasts and live news available. Basically, the application uses daily news clips as educational material which ends up teaching volumes about the English language to the user.
Besides enhancing listening skills, this application can be a great tool to be updated on what is happening around the country and the world. Moreover, since the application focuses on the listening part more, and there are speakers from the US, users can get a hold of the dialect and pick up the accent just by spending time listening to the various clips available on the app.
App link: Play Store
6. Listening Skills
The app opens with a white theme; the user can see a homepage of doctors. Tapping on the menu from the left-top side of the screen, they can access all the features. These include lessons to improve listening abilities, listening facts, relevant games, help, term, and exit. On a serene aura, the user may choose to read lessons from a set of files from the app.
To ensure practice, one may choose games to relish recreation while they learn. This app may be a digital handbook for aspirants giving them distinct types of insights as needed. Further, it is free and can be retained anytime later when needed.
App link: Play Store
7. English Listening and Speaking
This android-friendly app often mainly focuses on conversational English and daily speech in order to learn how to develop better communication and listening skills in English. This app also includes thousands of English speakers and conversationalists with audio and transcripts.
Along with that, the app also has games and tests that will aid you to become fluent at a faster pace. Succouring users to become better listeners, this application also assists in adding to your knowledge as you pick a category from daily life, science, technology, shopping, travel, and much more.
Besides this, the application also benefits you with English vocabulary as you hear more and more things, and grasp the words along with their meaning. Therefore, not just with listening skills, this application is supportive of the listening part of various exams like IELTS and TOEIC.
App link: Play Store
8. IELTS Listening English – ELI
With over one million downloads, the IELTS Listening English app is one of the best resources for those who want to improve their listening and comprehension skills. Though the app is directed at candidates wishing to appear in the IELTS exam, almost anyone can benefit from using it.
The app contains real-world conversations that not only enhance listening skills but also promote good speaking skills. The listening material is divided into three difficulty levels, each comprising 34 lessons. Users can refer to the transcript for better understanding and solve an exercise to check how well they understood what they heard.
The app also features downloadable files and offers online and offline listening modes, so learning never stops. Overall, this is a wonderful app to learn new vocabulary and common phrases, along with boosting your listening skills.
App Link: Play Store
9. English Listening Step-by-Step
This is another free app for kids and adults who have the goal of improving their listening skills. This brightly colored app comprises over 1000 audios on multiple topics ranging from family and food to science and business. The audios are segregated into beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels. Users can select the level they are most comfortable with and take it forward from there.
The app has many helpful features to assist listeners. They can listen to the audio in American or British accents and translate difficult words in their choice of language for better understanding. Plus, a transcript is available for every audio, along with a quick test to assess their listening exercise.
App Link: Play Sstore
10. English Listening Skills Practice
This application is beneficial to users who wish to enhance their listening skills and become more attentive to other people’s words. With conversations happening around 7 different categories, users can listen to them and become stronger listeners.
Each category comes with different clips that not only support in enhancing listening skills but also benefit with English Grammar, English speaking, and ultimately also enhance vocabulary. By listening to simple conversations, listeners are trained to become better speakers and communicators.
The application has more than 100 lessons, and each lesson also comes with a transcript for better understanding. After each lesson, the user has to pass an exam, where their listening skills are put to the test.
App link: Play Store
Other tools to enhance listening skills
Apart from apps, some handy tools may add to the comfort. Here are some choices that we found valuable for you to consider:
- LyricsTraining: This tool combines listening to songs with learning a language. Students can choose songs in a variety of languages watch the videos of the song and try to reconstruct the lyrics.
- Listen Notes: Being a podcast search engine, it consists of a huge collection of podcasts on a variety of topics. Podcasts are a great source of listening materials for students and can be easily downloaded on phones.
- teachVid: This app combines listening with watching videos. It uses videos from YouTube and then builds a wide range of activities around them like text reconstruction, translation, MCQs, jumbled sentences, etc. You can choose the types of exercise they want to do in order to improve their listening skills.
- Read Aloud: This app is based on a text-to-speech voice reader, which can be plugged into Google Chrome or Firefox browsers. Once the plug-in has been added after a couple of seconds, students can go to any webpage and click on the icon on the tool browser. The app then will read the text of the page to the user. This is a great way to develop both listening as well as reading skills.
- Synth: This app can be an admirable associative in making podcasts more interactive and also engages the students. One can record their own podcast, message, or any audio file to listen to and then they can record their own reply. It is a great way to collect knowledge together and create a dialogue with students as they develop their listening skills.
Conclusion
While there can be multiple strategies like classes and mentorship available to ameliorate listening skills, apps can be a clear bonus edge. For those who are looking for additional and personalized coaching sessions or associates, digital options like these apps are often of great value.
The above-mentioned list has a collection of choices that may suit the diverse needs of listening. Consequently, read through all these to check if any of these are fit for you or your loved one.
An engineer, Maths expert, Online Tutor and animal rights activist. In more than 5+ years of my online teaching experience, I closely worked with many students struggling with dyscalculia and dyslexia. With the years passing, I learned that not much effort being put into the awareness of this learning disorder. Students with dyscalculia often misunderstood for having just a simple math fear. This is still an underresearched and understudied subject. I am also the founder of Smartynote -‘The notepad app for dyslexia’,