The Brain Dominance Inventory

• Do not try to write down everything you hear or refer to your notes before you speak. Listening and speaking are not writing skills. You must develop your auditory skills in order to understand what people say to you.
• Begin with comprehension methods that use pictures or drawings rather than words, such as a photo book, the Learnables, and picture dictionaries. Use these along with a recording or a video.
• When building listening comprehension with techniques such as the TPR techniques and games, use them without writing anything down. Plan to write down the words you learned afterwards. This provides notes to help you remember and keeps you focused on auditory learning in the sessions.

• Listen to texts for which you have both an audio recording and a written transcription.

• Use colors, pictures, or physical groupings of words to help you remember related words, as in the Memory Reinforcement techniques.
• Take written notes when listening to a lecture or sermon.
• Make charts, graphs, or mind maps to aid retention.
• When hearing a new word you want to remember, visualize the spelling.

• Use vocabulary cards as in the Flash Cards technique.

• Use your computer to review, to rework and to organize your data. Look at words on the screen to help reinforce your learning.
• Use mnemonic devices which rely on visualization, such as the Mental Image technique.
• Read as much as you can. (Vocabulary acquired through reading is largely transferable to listening comprehension.)

• Do not rely on writing alone to help you produce memorized phrases or routines. Listen to recordings or live speeches to form an auditory and visual image of these phrases. Your notes can serve as a memory cue to help you recognize word breaks. You cannot, however, fully reproduce all the nuances of intonation, rhythm, and general phonology by only reading what you have written.
• Read as much as you can. (Grammatical constructions acquired through reading are largely transferable to listening comprehension.)