3 Essential Tips to Sharpen and Increase Your Attention Span for the CELPIP

Have you ever found yourself trying to pay attention to something or someone and then realized that your mind has totally wandered away from that person or thing you were trying to focus on?

Or even worse, if you've taken this output before or have been working hard to get ready to take it, do you ever find yourself getting totally distracted right when you need to be paying the most attention to what you're doing?

If that's you, then today's episode is going to be great for you because I'll be sharing three simple to use strategies that will help you begin to work on building your attention span. Let's get started. Well, hello there and welcome to the Speak English Fearlessly Podcast.

This is the podcast for motivated English learners who want to speak English fearlessly and learn practical tips and strategies to conquer the CELPIP exam.

I also love to feature encouraging interviews with regular people, people just like you who are working towards becoming fluent in English so we can learn from their experiences together. Who am I? My name is Aaron Nelson and I've been an English teacher for over 17 years.

I'm a certified Celpip trainer and I now help students prepare for the CELPIP exam through online classes.

You know if you want to do well on the listening section of the celpip, become a pro at paying focused attention to differing audio lengths and taking notes at the same time. I've talked about note taking before and I'm going to do it again at some point because I think note taking is a vital CELPIP skill to master.

But I haven't touched on paying attention to what you're listening to yet, especially if that audio is long. On the celpip, you will face audio between one and a half and 10 minutes long.

You'll not just be listening during that time, you also need to stay focused and paying attention to what you're listening to, which means you're listening for key details so you can take notes about them.

Today I want to offer you a few practical strategies, three of them actually, that you can put into practice today that will help you to begin working on your attention Spanish and the first one is simply focus on your attention span. Being able to build your listening skills in English and for the CELPIP requires practice and something that might feel short on supply these days.

Your attention. I think this is something we need to especially be working on in our video TikTok shorts oriented world.

My first idea for you is actually a challenge. If you want your attention span and your listening skills to improve, you need to create focused Time to actually devote to building those skills.

And when I say focused time, I mean blocked out completely where no cell phone devices can break in. You might need to take the big step of actually turning your cell phone off or putting it in airplane mode while you practice.

And maybe your cell phone is not what distracts you. Perhaps for you, it's the people around you. Maybe you need to create some space from family or friends so that you can practice.

Not that you're going to completely block them out or anything, but maybe make a deal with them that from an X time to X time on X days, you're not available because you are working on your English listening skills. And when I say X time on X days, I'm suggesting that you actually pick a time and a day where you block that time out.

And if your distraction is your family or friends, make sure that you kindly let them know that from that time, that time that you set to the time that you'd set to finish, that you are not available and to please let you focus. Setting aside this kind of time is a big one for us all. And I'm talking to myself here as much as with you.

I say I'm talking to myself too, because I need to bring this one back in my own life.

Specifically in working on this podcast and thinking about it, I realized that up until about January of this year, I had the regular practice of recording each episode on Saturday afternoon every week like clockwork. I prepped, recorded, edited, and scheduled each episode so that it was ready Tuesday morning. But I did it all on Saturday evening.

But lately, maybe because of Christmas break and I've kind of fallen out of that Saturday routine, now it's getting done on Sunday evening or even worse, Monday night. That's cutting it way too close for me.

So I'm going to have to be taking my own advice here and blocking out my Saturday afternoon podcast recording time. Once again, it worked great before. I just need to put it back in place. And here's a bonus tip.

Try blocking off your practice time in your cell phone's calendar and set alarms for it to remind you. I'm doing that right now. Just give me a minute. I'll be right back. Okay, I'm back. I've set my alarm.

I've set that time on Saturday afternoons where I'm going to be working on my podcast. It's on my calendar. Did you block off some time on your calendar to be focusing on your listening skills practice if you haven't?

What if you hit pause on this podcast and went ahead and did it. But make sure you come back after, don't get distracted and go and do something else.

I want you to come back and listen to the other two tips that will help you begin focusing on your attention span. Let's get on to step number two and it's a toughie. Stop multitasking.

And this is being said by the guy who has been researching this episode while chatting with my brother on messenger at the same time. No matter what you tell yourself, my friend, you are not good at multitasking. And actually, science confirms it, nobody really is.

When I said goodbye to my brother and focused solely on what I was working on here, instead of jumping back and forth between tabs, which is what I was doing before, I noticed a dramatic increase in my ability to focus and actually get my ideas and what I was reading about down to share with you, my ideas flowed so much easier. I felt like a load lifted off of me. And funnily enough, there is actually a name for this. It's called cognitive load. Imagine that. It's a real thing.

Cognitive load refers to the amount of information our brain can process at the same time. And yes, we do have limits to what our minds can effectively handle at one time.

When we try to cram too much information in, like what often happens when multitasking, we risk overloading our brain, which leads us to disconnect from whatever we're trying to pay attention to. I bet you've experienced this.

Here's how the Mayo Clinic website puts it, and I quote, depending on your preferred style of communication, receiving information in multiple ways can produce cognitive overload.

If you are overwhelmed by more information than your brain can receive, you may develop frustration and detachment from the details your brain is processing. Did you notice that Mayo Clinic points to frustration and detachment from what you're trying to process?

Meaning you're no longer able to focus on what you're trying to listen to if you try to multitask. And that is the exact opposite of what we need to have happening with our listening skills, isn't it?

So if you want to see your ability to focus on what you're listening to improve, stop multitasking. And to help you reduce and remove the temptation to multitask, because I know it's a big one, try these simple suggestions.

Number one, make sure your phone has been silenced when you practice. That means you won't hear or see calls or notifications coming in.

If you actually decide to block off time for your practice, like what I suggested in step one, you can likely even schedule your cell phone to switch to sleep mode or silent mode at the same day and time that you set aside to practice.

And this is a really smart thing to do because you're kind of automating your focus time so that when it's time for you to be practicing, your phone goes away. Like it it stops functioning the way it always does.

Yes, it will still receive messages, it will still receive phone calls, but it won't let you know about it until you are ready. And if you're working with a laptop or desktop computer, make sure you don't have other tabs open on your web browser.

You don't feel the temptation to open them and become distracted by the amazing things waiting for you on them. And don't worry, you can find every single one of those precious tabs again if you pop open your web browser's browsing history.

In other words, all your tabs can be closed. You can find them again later if you need them.

Even more important, never have your email, YouTube, or social media accounts open while you're focusing on your listening skills. Having notifications come in from those sources especially is a powerful pull away from what you're trying to accomplish.

By completely shutting them out during your practice time, you'll be doing yourself and your attention span a huge favor. And remember this, you don't have to respond to every email, every phone call, and every social media notification when they come in.

If one happens to sneak in during your practice time, you can let it go and return to it after when you're finished your practice time. All right. Number three Consume long form content on purpose. This is vital.

While it's okay to begin small with your listening practice, if you want to see your attention span and your ability to focus improve, make listening to long form content while taking notes about what you're listening to one of your top goals. So how long is long form? I've listened to podcasts that are over an hour long.

For me, that's really long form, and only because it's way longer than what I typically listen to. But that's not what I'm thinking about for you and your CELPIP prep.

For your regular listening practice, try listening to content that is between 15 and 30 minutes long every day.

For your CELPIP practice, focus on listening to audio that is anywhere from one and a half to to ten minutes long, because that's the lengths you'll be facing on the exam. Now I know that that doesn't sound long form 1 1/2 minutes to 10 minutes. That's not very long.

But don't forget when you're listening, you need to be also actively taking notes about what you're listening to so that you can practice. And here's a bonus, practice listening without pausing or repeating what you're listening to.

Because remember on the exam you won't be able to stop or replay what you're hearing. So you can do yourself a huge favor by shaping your practice time in this way. So there you have it.

To focus on increasing your attention span and improving your listening skills. Actually block out practice time, put it on your calendar. Also stop multitasking.

And finally, practice listening to long form content while taking notes about what you're listening to.

And once again, if you're focusing all of your efforts to get ready for the CELPIP exam, that long form content only needs to be one and a half to ten minutes long and everything in between. But not just listening. You need to be actively practicing taking notes to what you're listening to.

And if you'd like an easy to use guide to help you with your note taking, I've got you covered my friend. Just go to celpipsuccess.com resources sign up and you'll get access to a 10 point note taking guide to help you practice this vital skill.

This guide is totally free and waiting just for you to help you begin mastering your note taking skills for the Celpip. Once again, you can grab it totally [email protected] resources. It's available for you right now.

Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. I hope that it has helped you and that you will come back again next Tuesday. Have a great week. Bye.