Narrow Listening: How To Fix Your “I Don’t Understand Natives” Problem

Listening to a native speaker can be quite challenging. This feeling of "losing it" is known to every language learner. Once comprehensible speech begins to morph into a continuous stream of sound with no pauses between words, you may find yourself sinking in the quicksand of L2 input.

In fact, this "WTF" stage can last for a long time; typically, learners struggle to catch the point in most real-life dialogues until they reach the B2 level. After several attempts to understand foreign language speech, you may become desperate. But don't worry.

There is a proven solution to this problem. I used this strategy to quickly boost my listening scores on the DELF exam, and it ended up making listening comprehension one of my strongest skills in French.

The strategy I'm talking about is called narrow listening.

What is narrow listening?

The narrow reading technique was developed by Stephen Krashen, who struggled his way through Mexico with only a little Spanish.

After having several uncontrolled conversations with Mexicans, Krashen realized that he needed to change his approach. Instead of letting natives expand on topics he knew little about, he began questioning them about something very specific and well-known to him: the story of Hernando Cortes. Here, the linguist had an obvious advantage; he had already read this story in English. This background knowledge helped him to keep on track with what they were saying, even if he failed to understand certain words.

Everything began to come together. Krashen found these "directed" conversations intrinsically engaging, and so did the natives. Hearing different opinions on the same subject helped him consolidate specific vocabulary, as he constantly came across the same words over and over again. Finally, he felt that he could understand Spanish.

After this experience, Krashen further developed the narrow listening technique to the extent where he would actually record several native speakers talking about the same topic for 2-3 minutes. Later on, he would repeatedly listen to these recordings until he felt confident enough to move on to the next topic.

The Narrow Listening Technique Step by Step

In short, the narrow listening strategy proposed by Stephen Krashen involves five simple steps:

Step one: Choose a topic and formulate a question.

You can choose a topic as simple as asking someone to talk about their family or as complex as discussing the current economic situation in their country. It should be interesting to you and potentially interesting for a native speaker.

However, the most important part is to formulate a question that will keep a native speaker talking for at least a couple of minutes.

Avoid asking yes-no questions like “Do you like to travel?” or “Do you speak foreign languages?”. Instead, ask about the countries they have traveled to and what they think is the most effective way to learn a foreign language.

Step two: Do some background research.

Your English skills can be a great asset in helping you grasp the general idea of what people are saying. You can improve by doing two things:

• Learning some topic-related vocabulary (you will need some to ask a question anyway).

• Reading two or three English articles about the topic you have selected (just like Krashen read about Cortes).

Topic-specific vocabulary will allow you to navigate a native speaker’s monologue, and your familiarity with the topic will help you fill in the blanks.

Step three: "Interview" several native speakers.

You want to ask your question to at least 3-4 natives. Ideally, this question should automatically pop up in your head every time you get a chance to chat with someone who speaks your target language.

Krashen recommends recording these people (with their permission, of course!) and then listening to their responses during your downtime. However, later in this post, I will offer you a way to transform the narrow listening technique. You can skip this step without losing effectiveness.

Step four: Listen until you’re fed up.

Repetition is essential in language learning. This is how memory works. Unless you're using mnemonic techniques, repetition (in whatever form) is the only way to learn new vocabulary.

That’s why Krashen insists on having access to the recordings. It ensures that your brain gets a sufficient dose of repeated content to work with.

Typically, three to four repetitions are enough to extract everything important from a short 2-3 minute speech sample. However, beginners, who tend to understand about 10% more with each successive listening, will benefit from a larger number of repetitions (7-8)2.

Step five: Gradually explore related topics.

Once you have finished processing public opinions on the best language learning strategies, you can move on to another round of interviews on a related topic. The key word here is "related." You should choose a topic that is close enough so that all the vocabulary acquired in the first stage can be reviewed during the second round of narrow listening.

For instance, if you started with a question on the best way to learn a foreign language, your subsequent candidates could be "Do you think it's necessary to know another language in the XXI century?" or "What language makes the most sense to learn?" and so on.

Narrow Listening Without a Tape Recorder

Narrow listening seems like a fairly simple technique when it comes to execution. At the end of the day, all you have to do really is just listen to recordings of native speakers as much as possible. The problem, however, is how to obtain these recordings, and this is where the whole system breaks down.

What Krashen offers is to go out there with a tape recorder and interview native speakers on the topic you previously researched. And if the mere idea of recording someone doesn’t already make you squirm, here’s another problem: you may not be able to find those native speakers where you live.

The quick solution is HelloTalk, which can be turned into a powerful narrow listening tool (should you approach it mindfully, of course). Since HelloTalk is a language exchange app, most people out there are happy to help you learn their native tongue. So after a quick chat with 5-6 native speakers, I often ask them to record me a short audio message about [whatever topic] in their language.

And voilà – I have perfect recordings that I can narrow-listen to as many times as I want. Problem solved.

Narrow Listening with YouTube

HelloTalk can be a wonderful thing to use, but there are limits. Not everybody agrees to send an audio message, and ones sent rarely provide an in-depth discussion of the topic in question. So I often resort to yet another way of obtaining valid topic-centered speech samples.

Which one?

I parasitize on what other people have already created and use this ultimate linguistic database called the Internet. More specifically, YouTube.

How I Use YouTube for Narrow Listening

First, I define the topic. The choice largely depends on my proficiency level, but I typically try to stick with simple stuff like relationships, hobbies, pets, travel, languages, and even food. It just offers a larger assortment of videos. There are millions of bloggers who talk about dating, but only a handful of those who expand on morphosyntactic analysis that I may be equally interested in.

After the topic is set, I just choose a question (trying to keep it balanced in terms of specificity-generality) and translate it into my target language. I may even go as far as to create a short list of translated questions for the days ahead. Although YouTube is usually damn good at doing this work for me (just look at the “Watch next” column with its suggestions).

Here are some examples of questions I come up with:

• What are the best places to visit in California/London/Barcelona? (There are always at least a dozen lists of top-10 places in literally every God-forsaken place.)

• How do you make paella? (I have found that recipes are a great way to grasp the “survival vocabulary.” After just ten such videos, you learn a word for every eatable thing on this planet.)

• How do you start training your Labrador retriever?

• Is coffee bad for your health?

• How much sleep do you need per night?

2 Ways to Practice Narrow Listening on YouTube

With all this, just go to YouTube and hit the search.

And there you have got a whole pool of public opinions on all sorts of things. It may be useful to restrict the results to shorter 2-3 minute videos so that you don’t end up feeling overwhelmed. Pick 3-4 videos, tag them, and dive in.

I realize that sooner or later, I end up finding one or two bloggers whom I can actually understand. At this point, narrow listening with YouTube becomes the easiest thing in the world. I simply go with everything this person has published on their channel. Usually, people create channels about their area of expertise, which means I automatically get filtered and focused content on the topic of my interest and in my target language.

What could be better, right?

It's true that narrow listening requires some groundwork, but there is literally no better way to improve your aural comprehension than this technique. So be sure to give it a try.