Shadowing Practice: Active vs. Passive Listening: Why You’re Not Improving Your English - Learn English Speaking with 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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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Active vs. Passive Listening: Why You’re Not Improving Your English”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: listening, passive, language, active, listen. This video has 118 sentences and 1694 words to shadow. The speech runs for 12:36. The speaker talks at a steady 134 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. 87% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is easy to follow.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| passive adjective | /ˈpæs.ɪv/ | Being subjected to an action without producing a reaction. |
| engage verb | /ɪnˈɡeɪd͡ʒ/ | To engross or hold the attention of; to keep busy or occupied. |
| actively adverb | /ˈæktɪvli/ | In an active manner. |
| skill noun | /skɪl/ | A capacity to do something well; a technique, an ability, usually acquired or learned, as opposed to abilities that are regarded as innate. |
| vocabulary noun | /vəˈkæb.jə.lə.ɹi/ | A usually alphabetized and explained collection of words e.g. of a particular field, or prepared for a specific purpose, often for learning. |
| essentially adverb | /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/ | In essence: by nature. |
| podcast noun | /ˈpɑdˌkæst/ | A program, especially an audio program, produced on a regular basis, delivered over the Internet in a compressed digital format and designed for playback on… |
| technique noun | /tɛkˈniːk/ | The practical aspects of a given art, occupation etc.; formal requirements. |
| partly adverb | /ˈpɑɹtli/ | In part, or to some degree, but not completely. |
| grammar noun | /ˈɡɹæm.ə(ɹ)/ | A system of rules and principles for the structure of a language, or of languages in general. |
| concentrate verb | /ˈkɑn.sən.tɹeɪt/ | To bring to, or direct toward, a common center; to unite more closely; to gather into one body, mass, or force. |
| exposure noun | /ɪkˈspəʊ.ʒə(ɹ)/ | The condition of being exposed, uncovered, or unprotected. |
| shadow noun | /ˈʃædəʊ̯/ | A dark image projected onto a surface where light (or other radiation) is blocked by the shade of an object. |
| whereas | /(h)wɛɹˈæz/ | In contrast; whilst on the contrary; although. |
| engagement noun | /ɪnˈɡeɪd͡ʒ.mənt/ | An appointment, especially to speak or perform. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| come up with verb | To manage to produce, deliver, or present (something) by inventing, creating, thinking of, or obtaining it. |
| go away verb | To depart or leave a place. |
| sit down verb | To assume a sitting position from a standing position. |
| wash over verb | To pass (one) unnoticed so that one is unaffected by it. |
| write down verb | To produce or set (something) down in writing; to record something. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | you've just been listening · you've been listening |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have changed · have actually been · you've never really engaged |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | one which was · people who watch · Minds, which is |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | being forced · was taught · had been taught |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 35 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, you've, doesn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: thesis /ˈθisɪs/, mouthful /ˈmaʊθfʊl/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, exposure /ɪkˈspəʊ.ʒə(ɹ)/, shadow /ˈʃædəʊ̯/, conclusion /kənˈkluːʒən/, concentration /ˌkɑn.sənˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: vocabulary /vəˈkæb.jə.lə.ɹi/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/, concentration /ˌkɑn.sənˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/, revolutionary /ˌɹɛvəˈluʃənɛɹi/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like passive, engage, actively.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.