Let's talk about a problem you might have when listening to English, especially when watching a movie: You don't understand what you hear. And this is not because you don't know the vocabulary.
If you read the transcript or the subtitles, you will understand the material just fine.
So you already know the words being used. You just don't recognize them when listening. So what should you do?
According to many research studies, an effective way to deal with this problem is to practice listening through easy-to-hard training.
In one study, participants were trained to perform a task related to hearing.
And there were three levels of difficulty - easy, normal, and difficult. The participants were divided into two groups.
The first group was trained to perform only the difficult version of that task.
The second group, however, started with the easy and normal versions first before performing the difficult version.
The researchers wanted to know which group would perform the difficult version better. So what was the result?
Well, despite having less training with the difficult version, the second group actually performed better.
