Listening Skills: listening for specific information

Listening for specific information is a common and useful listening skill. It means listening for the important details you need. You listen with a focus or purpose rather than try to understand every word. What information to listen for depends on what questions you need to answer in the listening task or what purpose you want to achieve in real-life communication.

For example, if you listen to a weather forecast, you should expect to hear information about the temperatures, descriptions of the weather, such as sunny, cloudy, and chances of rain or snow.

Next I will read a weather report. Please note down the important numbers showing information about temperatures.

It's partly sunny this afternoon. Temperatures will remain 10 to 15 degrees with highs at 22 degrees. The chance of rain is 20 percent. Tomorrow morning, it will be mostly cloudy. Low temperatures will drop to 8 degrees in the suburbs, but the downtown area will see a high of 25 degrees. But there will be showers tomorrow night.

Did you get all the information about temperatures? Please check your answers. The numbers in red show the information about temperatures.

Let’s see another example. What information do you expect to hear from the following airport announcement?

American Airlines Flight 282 to Dallas is now boarding at Gate 10.

When you listen to this announcement, you should focus your attention on the flight number “Flight 282”, the arrival city “Dallas”, and the boarding gate “Gate 10”.

Next you are going to hear an interview. The interviewee will talk about his childhood, family, his work, and so on. Read the exercises first and guess what kind of specific information you will hear before listening.