Pratica di Shadowing: Active vs. Passive Listening: Why You’re Not Improving Your English - Impara a parlare inglese con i video
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So today we are talking about active versus passive listening.
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Now on the face of it they might seem like complete opposites
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and it's easy to dismiss passive listening as as I did in fact on our blog a few years ago
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but I have changed my mind partly because of my own experience partly
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because of dozens of emails that I got from listeners to our podcast
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and partly because I went away and read every single research paper that I could on the subject.
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So in this video I want to address this question.
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We're going to talk about the difference between active and passive listening.
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We'll talk about the different skills that active and passive listening help you develop in your English.
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We'll talk about when you should focus on active listening and
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when you should focus on passive listening and how you can do both even if you have a busy schedule.
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And stick around to the end where I will explain why passive listening, if you're doing it properly, isn't ever truly passive.
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So what is active listening and what is passive listening?
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Well, passive listening generally means exposure to the language.
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This can either be indirect, like hearing the language in the background, or it can be listening to something without fully concentrating,
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while you're doing other tasks, while you're walking the dog, or while you're on the metro, or something like that.
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Essentially, it's listening and not thinking about being forced to respond or engage in any way with what you're listening to.
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So you don't need to fully concentrate or understand everything that you hear.
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On the other hand, active listening involves focused attention on the material and some kind of engagement with it.
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This can be as simple as listening very carefully to what you are hearing and trying to critically analyze the vocabulary,
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the grammar and the structures that the speakers are using.
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It could be something like noting down at the same time.
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It could even be more advanced techniques, things like shadowing for example, where you repeat after the speaker.
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Essentially, the way to think about it is that active listening treats listening as a skill to practice and develop,
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whereas passive is more like ambient exposure.
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You're there and so is the material that you are listening to, but you're not forced to engage with it in any way
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now of course there is not a finite line between active
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and passive it's not black and white it's a scale
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and perhaps on one end of the scale you have you know walking past a crowded restaurant
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and you hear some English in the background
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and right on the other end of the scale you have someone sitting down with all their materials
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and really studying what they are listening to.
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So it's not black and white, but it is a useful way to think about your listening activities.
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The key thing really is what you can call meaningful cognitive engagement.
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In other words, are you really engaging your brain and processing the language, or are you just letting it wash over you?
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So what skills does active listening develop and what skills does passive listening develop?
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Well, let's start with passive listening
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because it's very easy to dismiss it as doing absolutely nothing and saying you must listen actively all the time.
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Otherwise, it's just not worth it.
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There have actually been some interesting studies into the impact of passive listening
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and I'll share a few of them with you now.
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Probably the most famous is this one which was from a PhD thesis in 2007 called Wordlikeness Judgements,
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Phonotactic Probability, Accent and Repetition in Auditory Recognition of Novel Words in a Foreign Language.
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Now, that is a bit of a mouthful, but essentially what this research suggested is
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that you can learn a language pretty well just by hearing it and not really knowing what it means.
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In other words, it can kind of exist in the background and somehow you just acquire it.
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So similar to how we learn languages as babies, you know, our mother tongues are just existing around us.
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We're not necessarily actively engaging with the language in the same way as a student would.
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But, of course, we all learn our native languages.
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So that is one of the key theories that supports this idea that actually kind of passive listening,
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language existing in the background, is more helpful than people had previously given it credit for.
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Now, further studies into passive listening mainly talk about its effectiveness in building familiarity with the sounds of language.
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In other words, helping train your ear to how a language sounds,
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rather than helping you improve your knowledge of particular structures, grammar, vocabulary, and so on.
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So essentially passive listening fits into this category of yes this is a good thing
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that helps you learn and kind of re -familiarizes yourself with things
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that you might already have known and kind of trains your ear to understand sounds in the language.
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Active listening on the other is far more agreed upon in terms of its benefits for listening comprehension,
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for vocabulary development and overall proficiency in a language.
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And in fact learning how to listen actively is a really important skill.
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There was an interesting bit of research from back in 1996 in fact
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and you can see here that the the paper is just a photocopy that is clearly quite dated.
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But the long and the short of it is there was research done on two different groups of students.
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One group was taught techniques about how to listen actively and the other group was not.
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And surprise surprise, the group that had been taught the techniques about how to listen actively
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and how to really engage with the material they were listening to performed much better on every single test.
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So listen actively, it will help you improve your English much faster.
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Now I'll put a bunch of links down below this video
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to some of the original studies so you can go
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and check them out for yourself if you'd like but they all tend to come up with pretty similar conclusions.
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And that's that passive listening gives you kind of implicit,
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intuitive knowledge and familiarity, whereas active listening gives you more explicit, retrievable knowledge.
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Now, what does that mean in practice?
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Let's say if you are just listening passively to English all the time.
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You might kind of intuitively know the correct pronunciation of the word,
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or how to use a particular grammatical structure, but you're much less likely to be able to use them yourself,
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because you've never really engaged with it, you've just been listening.
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If, on the other hand, you've been listening actively, you've been really engaging with the material,
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you will find that you are able to reproduce what you've heard much more effectively.
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Now, this probably doesn't sound revolutionary.
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You might be watching this and thinking, of course you need to pay attention, of course you need to engage with language,
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otherwise you're not going to learn.
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Yes, it is kind of obvious, but at the same time there are
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so many people who watch stuff on YouTube or listen to podcasts
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or watch Netflix and kind of miss this opportunity because they are just watching or just listening.
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They are not actively engaging with the material that they are listening to or that they are watching.
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So my objective with this is to show you how you can make just a few small changes,
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like focusing on words and phrases that you hear, or writing down summaries, or practicing shadowing, things like that.
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And the results that you get will be significantly better.
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Now, this isn't to say you should never do any kind of passive listening.
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You should never.. just listen, you should always be at 110 % in terms of concentration.
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No, that's not what I'm trying to suggest here.
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There is always a time for just unwinding and listening to a little bit of English in the background.
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It is not a bad thing.
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And whether that's, you know, when you're at the gym or going for a walk
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or doing something where you don't want to be concentrating all the time.
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That is a great time to do a little bit of listening, but you are happy to be passive.
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And this is one of the reasons that I'm such a big fan of podcasts to learn English, to learn any language for that matter.
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I have got my own podcast, English Learning for Curious Minds, which is for intermediate to advanced English learners.
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And what I always recommend to people is to mix and match the activities that you're doing.
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So on the bus, on the way to work in the morning,
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you might like to just listen and not worry so much about catching every single word.
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Just listen and enjoy.
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Listen for understanding.
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Then in the afternoon or the weekend or whatever it might be, you can do a more active listening activity.
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You can sit down, you can follow along with the transcript, you can use vocabulary lists,
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you can just engage in a more active way with the material, which is going to help develop things like your vocabulary,
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your understanding of sentence structure and grammar, and your overall proficiency in English.
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So it doesn't have to be either or.
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The best combination is a little bit of both.
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And I said at the start that I would tell you why passive listening, if you're doing it properly, is never truly passive.
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Now that's because, as we said,
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the difference between passive and active is it's all about meaningful cognitive activity.
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In other words, engaging your brain.
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And if you're listening to something that you're interested in if you are passionate about butterflies or football
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or whatever it might be and you're listening to content about
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that then it should be hard for it to be completely passive
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because if it's interesting enough you will already almost by default be paying attention
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Vocabolario e note di pronuncia per questa lezione
Questa lezione di conversazione si basa sul video “Active vs. Passive Listening: Why You’re Not Improving Your English”. Le parole che ritornano più spesso: listening, passive, language, active, listen. Questo video contiene 118 frasi e 1694 parole da ripetere con lo shadowing. Il parlato dura 12:36. Chi parla mantiene un ritmo costante di circa 134 parole al minuto, comodo per lo shadowing. Il 87% delle parole rientra nelle 3.000 più comuni dell’inglese, quindi il lessico è facile da seguire.
Vocaboli chiave di questo video
15 parole del video che vale la pena imparare, con pronuncia e significato:
| Parola | Pronuncia | Significato |
|---|---|---|
| passive aggettivo | /ˈpæs.ɪv/ | passivo |
| engage verbo | /ɪnˈɡeɪd͡ʒ/ | attirare, convergere |
| actively avverbio | /ˈæktɪvli/ | attivamente |
| skill sostantivo | /skɪl/ | abilità, capacità |
| vocabulary sostantivo | /vəˈkæb.jə.lə.ɹi/ | vocabolario |
| essentially avverbio | /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/ | in essenza |
| podcast sostantivo | /ˈpɑdˌkæst/ | podcast, audioprogramma |
| technique sostantivo | /tɛkˈniːk/ | tecnica |
| grammar sostantivo | /ˈɡɹæm.ə(ɹ)/ | grammatica |
| concentrate verbo | /ˈkɑn.sən.tɹeɪt/ | concentrare |
| exposure sostantivo | /ɪkˈspəʊ.ʒə(ɹ)/ | esposizione |
| shadow sostantivo | /ˈʃædəʊ̯/ | ombra |
| whereas | /(h)wɛɹˈæz/ | laddove, mentre |
| engagement sostantivo | /ɪnˈɡeɪd͡ʒ.mənt/ | impegno |
| meaningful aggettivo | /ˈmiː.nɪŋ.fl̩/ | significativo, sensato |
I phrasal verb che sentirai
| Parola | Significato |
|---|---|
| come up with verbo | ideare, escogitare |
| go away verbo | partire, andarsene |
| sit down verbo | sedersi, accomodarsi |
| write down verbo | sottoscrivere, annotare |
La grammatica di questo video
Le strutture che chi parla usa di più, con le parole esatte del video:
| Struttura | Nel video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — un’azione iniziata prima e ancora in corso | you've just been listening · you've been listening |
| Present perfect have/has + participio passato — un’azione passata che conta ancora adesso | have changed · have actually been · you've never really engaged |
| Frasi relative who / which + frase — un’informazione in più su una persona o una cosa | one which was · people who watch · Minds, which is |
| Forma passiva be + participio passato — conta ciò che accade, non chi lo fa | being forced · was taught · had been taught |
Pronuncia a cui fare attenzione
Chi parla usa 35 contrazioni e forme ridotte, come you're, you've, doesn't. Pronunciale nella forma breve, così come le senti.
- I suoni “th”: thesis /ˈθisɪs/, mouthful /ˈmaʊθfʊl/
- I suoni “sh” e “zh”: essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, exposure /ɪkˈspəʊ.ʒə(ɹ)/, shadow /ˈʃædəʊ̯/, conclusion /kənˈkluːʒən/, concentration /ˌkɑn.sənˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/
- Parole lunghe — attenzione all’accento: vocabulary /vəˈkæb.jə.lə.ɹi/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/, concentration /ˌkɑn.sənˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/, revolutionary /ˌɹɛvəˈluʃənɛɹi/
I suoni difficili per chi parla italiano:
- /h/ — va soffiata, non è muta: whereas /(h)wɛɹˈæz/, helpful /ˈhɛlp.fl̩/, comprehension /ˌkɑmpɹɪˈhɛnʃn̩/
- Consonante finale — senza aggiungere una vocale dopo: passive /ˈpæs.ɪv/, engage /ɪnˈɡeɪd͡ʒ/, podcast /ˈpɑdˌkæst/, technique /tɛkˈniːk/, concentrate /ˈkɑn.sən.tɹeɪt/
- /æ/ — più aperta della “e”: passive /ˈpæs.ɪv/, actively /ˈæktɪvli/, vocabulary /vəˈkæb.jə.lə.ɹi/, podcast /ˈpɑdˌkæst/, grammar /ˈɡɹæm.ə(ɹ)/
Come esercitarsi con questo video
- Ascolta tutto il video una volta senza parlare e annota le parole che non conosci.
- Fai shadowing frase per frase a velocità normale, ripetendo ognuna finché il tuo ritmo coincide con quello di chi parla.
- Registrati e confronta con l’originale, facendo attenzione a parole come passive, engage, actively.
Cos'è la tecnica dello Shadowing?
Shadowing è una tecnica di apprendimento delle lingue supportata da studi scientifici, originariamente sviluppata per la formazione dei traduttori professionisti e resa popolare dal poliglotta Dr. Alexander Arguelles. Il metodo è semplice ma potente: ascolti un audio in inglese di madrelingua e lo ripeti immediatamente ad alta voce — come un'ombra che segue il parlante con un ritardo di solo 1–2 secondi. A differenza dell'ascolto passivo o degli esercizi di grammatica, lo shadowing costringe il tuo cervello e i muscoli della bocca a elaborare e riprodurre simultaneamente i modelli di discorso reale. La ricerca dimostra che migliora significativamente la precisione della pronuncia, l'intonazione, il ritmo, il discorso connesso, la comprensione dell'ascolto e la fluidità del parlato — rendendolo uno dei metodi più efficaci per la preparazione alla prova di speaking dell'IELTS e per la comunicazione reale in inglese.