A student can write comfortable correctly, define it, and use it in a sentence. Then a native speaker says it at normal speed, and the student does not recognise the word at all.
This happens constantly, and it is not a listening problem. It is a storage problem. The word was learned as a shape on a page, never as a sound, so the ear has nothing to match against.
What a word actually is
A word you know well exists in several forms at once: how it looks, how it sounds, what it means, how it feels to say. Meet it only in writing and you build one of those and skip the rest.
That single form is enough to pass a written test, which is exactly why the gap goes unnoticed for years. It is not enough to catch the word in speech, and it is not enough to produce it in conversation.
English makes this worse than Turkish does
In Turkish, seeing a word gives you its sound. The writing system does that job reliably.
English does not. Comfortable has four syllables on the page and three in speech. Wednesday loses a whole syllable. Vegetable is not pronounced the way it is spelled by anyone. A Turkish student who assumes the page tells them the sound will be wrong often, and confidently.
Worse, once a word has been rehearsed silently with the wrong pronunciation, that version is what gets stored. Fixing it later means overwriting a memory rather than forming one, which is considerably harder.
Sound first, then everything else
The order that works is roughly:
Hear the word before seeing it. Say it out loud, more than once. Then look at the written form, and notice how it differs from what you expected. Then use it.
That third step matters more than it sounds. The surprise, the gap between the sound you heard and the letters you see, is the moment the spelling actually registers.
What this looks like at home
You do not need to speak English to do this well. Play the word, ask your child to repeat it, and listen for whether they are saying what they heard or what they think it should be.
Have them read out loud, at least sometimes. Silent reading lets mispronunciations pass unchallenged for months. Reading aloud makes them audible, which is the first step to fixing them.
And when a new word appears, ask for the sound before the meaning. "How do you say it?" before "what does it mean?" is a small reversal that puts the ear first.
The one that catches everyone
Words that look similar often sound nothing alike, and words that sound similar often look nothing alike. Quiet and quite separate cleanly the moment you say them out loud, and stay tangled forever if you only ever read them.
If a pair keeps getting confused on paper, try hearing them instead. Half the time the confusion is visual, and the ear resolves it in one round.
This is why listening is not a separate skill sitting beside vocabulary in GetSpeakin. Every word carries its sound, and games like Listen Up test the ear directly, because a word you cannot hear is only half learned.
Related: what spelling mistakes reveal
Try it with your class. GetSpeakin reads every answer and puts the words a child actually needs in front of them. Book a demo for your school.