Listening Skill

1. LISTENING SKILLS

1.1. Introduction to listening skills
            Listening is the act of hearing attentively. Research shows that 45% of our time is spent on listening. We listen more than speak. If this listening skill is used in a proper way we can master the tools of communicative skills. Listening is difficult, as human mind tends to distract easily. A person who controls his mind and listens attentively acquires various other skills and is benefited.
         Listening skill can be defined as, “Listening is the act of hearing attentively”. It is also a process similar to reading which should possess knowledge of phonology, syntax, semantics and text understanding. Thomlison (1984) defines listening as, “Active listening, which is very important for effective communication”. Listening can be also defined as, “More than just hearing and to understand and interpret the meaning of a conversation”.
         Listening skill makes you successful in workplace, family and in the society. Good listening skill is mandatory to get into a profession in communications, management, planning, sales, etc. Listening skills involve a different set of etiquettes, questioning for explanation, showing empathy and providing a suitable response. Good listening skills include the understanding ability. Body language is also a part of listening skill. Eye contact with the speaker, sitting straight and alert are the good gestures of a good listener. Listening is an active, knowledge guided process. Listening is a process, which involves perceiving that there’s systematic massage in a continuous stream of sound. Listeners are involved continuous cognitive process, in which factors of attention and memory are vitally involved. Listening involves the construction of a message from phonic material.

Listening is neglected study in school and colleges even through managers from around the world consider it a significant part of one’s communication skills. Our review is concern common faults of listening, purposes for listening, and results of good listening.

Listening is as important as the other three components of communication, namely speaking reading and writing. There are some causes follow.

• Ø Prejudice against the speaker.
• Ø External Distractions.
• Ø Thinking speed.
• Ø Premature Evaluation.
• Ø Semantic stereotypes.
• Ø Delivery.

1.2. Types of Listening

         There are different types of listening depending upon the situation and the environment, where the listening takes place. Few important types are the following
    * Whole-person listening-understanding the speaker, his words, thought, motive etc.
    * Appreciative Listening- Listening for appreciation and pleasure.
    * Attentive Listening –attentively listening each and every word.
    * Casual Listening- Listening not very attentive, listening casually without any interest.
    * Evaluative Listening- Listening to evaluate or judge something.

1.3. Tips for Effective Listening

  Few tips to master the tool of listening skill are given below.
    * Have eye contact with the speaker.
    * Sit straight and adapt a posture to tell the speaker that you are listening.
    * Show some gesture which represents attentive learning, for example nodding of the head.
    * Verbal responses while listening shows that you are a good listener.
    * Wait for the speaker to complete his speech and then share your views, don’t interrupt him.
    * Try to concentrate on the complete speech.
    * Do not give your views unless you are asked to do so. Interrupting and thrusting your views are mostly not liked by all people.
            Listening skill is a technique used for understanding, what is being said by taking into account how something is said and the nonverbal signs and body language that accompanies it. This technique requires practice as listening is very difficult. A person who controls is mind and practices attentive listening will be successful in life and his career.

1.4. Listening Skills

 1-Prejudice against the speaker: Perhaps we heard the quotation. “Who is saying it shouts so loudly that what is said is easily forgotten.” We are distracted because who the speaker is conflicts with our attitudes.

2-External Distractions: The preceding fault was more of an internal distraction. Some non-verbal cues are strong external distractions.

3-Thinking speed: Most of speak between 80 to 160 words per minutes.  Yet people have the capacity to think at the phenomenal rate up to 800 words per minute. That leaves time on the listener’s hands.

4– Semantic stereotypes: As certain kinds of people bother us so do their words. An interesting class inheritance occurs when discussing this question.

1.5. Purposes of listeners method: It should be no surprise that poor listening is not entirely the fault of the speakers.

There are four good reasons.

1-    To gain new information and ideas.

2-    To question and test evidence and assumptions.

3-    To be inspired.

4-    To improve your own communication.

There are results of good listening.

1-    Leads to helpful, positive attitudes by understanding the hindrances that lie in way of good listening.

2-    Permits the speaker and listeners to improve communication because each side is more aware of and receptive to the other viewpoint.

3-    Indicates by feed back to the speaker that listeners are interested, in turn, the speaker tries harder to give his or her best presentation.

4-    Helps listeners obtain useful information on which they can make accurate decisions.

1.6. Sub-Skills of Listening – Listening for Perception - Comprehension

Listening is an important component of the language teaching syllabus. A teacher’s role in a listening exercise is to create interest, reasons for listening, and the confidence to listen. For each listening exercise the teacher must have in mind -

·         What kind of listening is appropriate to the text
·         How the learner will "tune in" to the context.
·         Pictures that could be used to contextualize the talk
·         And the forming of the learner´s opinion on the topic
1.7. Sub-Skills of Listening
The sub-skills that can be emphasized in listening exercises include:
·         Listening for specific information
·         Following topic shifts
·         Predicting
·         Recognising transitions and sequence markers
·         Recognising word boundaries
·         Identifying keywords  and
·         Taking notes
There are two main reasons of listening - listening for comprehension and listening for perception.

1.8. Listening for Comprehension: In this the learner is given practice in developing listening for understanding by using listening materials and conducting listening activities which take into account the real-life needs of the learner. Listening for comprehension is more relevant to the teaching of listening at the middle and secondary school level. In this, the listening material is based on a particular context and the learner is given practice in specific areas of listening, which are related to their needs. Learners usually find these activities challenging.

1.9. Listening for Perception: Listening for perception is practiced more at the primary/middle school level where learners are introduced to the language. In this the learner is given practice in identifying the different sounds, sound combinations, and stress and intonation patterns of spoken English. The focus of the listening activity is aural perception. Comprehension is of secondary importance. The listening exercises do not use visuals so that the learners concentrate on the sound of words or intonation patterns. The learner has to rely on his/her ear to repeat these sounds. The methodology involves repetition of short, individual sounds. The teacher demonstrates the sounds which she wishes to teach while learners are encouraged to imitate and identify them using drill and choral repetition.

Another effective way is to use worksheets to give the students more practice. For example if the teacher wants the students to differentiate the two sounds /p/ and /b/ or /s/ and / ʃ / she makes the necessary worksheet with the relevant words and asks the students to underline what they hear. e.g.

/p/ and /b/                     /s/ and / ʃ  /

pin bin                                      sun shun

pun bun                         soot shoot

pan ban                         sin shin

pit bit                            seer sheer

1.10. Three Phases of Listening

Pre-listening Activities: Listening activities should consist of some well-structured pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening stages. The pre-listening phase is a kind of preparatory work which is to make the context explicit, clarify purposes and establish roles, procedures and goals for listening. The pre-listening stage helps learners to find out the aim of listening and provides the necessary background information.

Pre-listening work can consist of a whole range of activities, including:

• the teacher giving background information;
• the students reading something relevant;
• the students looking at pictures;
• discussion and answer session;
• written exercises;
• following instructions for the while-listening activity;
• consideration of how the while-listening activity will be done

         These types of exercise help to focus the learners’ minds on the topic, activating prior knowledge and language structures which have already been met. If the learner knows in advance that they are going to make a certain kind of response, they are immediately provided with a purpose in listening. 

While-listening Tasks: While-listening activities can be defined as tasks that students are asked to do during the time of listening to the text. The nature of these activities is to help learners to listen for meaning that is to elicit a message from spoken language. They concentrate on comprehension to understand important information from the passage. The aim of the while-listening stage for students is to understand the message of the text. While-listening exercises should be interesting and challenging. They should guide the students to handle the information and messages from the listening text.

• During the while-listening phase students usually respond to a listening text. They indicate appropriate pictures or answers to multiple-choice questions, complete a cloze test, fill in the blanks of incomplete sentences, or write short answers to the questions etc.

Post-listening Task:The post-listening stage comprises of all the exercises which are done after listening to the text. Some of these activities may be the extensions of those carried out at pre- and while-listening work but some may not be related to them at all and present a totally independent part of the listening session. Post-listening activities allow the learners to ‘reflect’ on the language from the passage on sound, grammar and vocabulary. There are a few tasks which teachers may do in the classroom after listening to a text.

• discussing students’ reactions to the content of the listening selection
• asking students thought-provoking questions to encourage discussion
• setting students to work in pairs to create dialogues based on the listening text
• assigning reading and writing activities based on what students listened to.

Post-listening exercises should be interesting and motivating. 

1.11. Listening Material

Listening for specific information: These activities are good for training the students to hear everything and to identify individual words. They are challenging and students can see an improvement. For lower levels a dialogue can be taken from a course book. The teacher can then gap-fill the target language and students listen and write down what they hear.

Listening for general understanding:  It is important to set up the task before the tape recorder is played because by doing so the students would listen with a purpose, expectation, similar to the way we listen in real life.  This activity should be followed by some sort of feedback so the students can feel assured that they extracted the information successfully.

Extracting specific information:  Very often the listener is involved in the use of receptive skills for the sole purpose of extracting specific information (scanning). In other words, the listener will hear a piece of language for the purpose of finding out only one or two facts.

Getting the general picture: Learners often read because they want to get a general picture. It is the main idea they are interested in, not the detail. Indeed the skill of listening to get the general picture presupposes the reader's ability to pick out the main points and discard the irrelevant.

Inferring opinion: The ability to infer opinion and attitude is largely based on the recognition of linguistic style and its use to achieve appropriate purposes.

1.12. Using a Tape recorder to develop listening

Listening practice: Provide ideal listening practice material for learners. A recording provides an opportunity for the learner to listen to a sample of language which is clear and of a high quality, and is spoken by a native speaker of English. If they listen to the cassette while following the text in the book, learners will be able to see exactly how the speech stream is broken up into individual words.

Comprehension skills: Using a cassette and book together can help in important ways with both reading and listening skills. For example, listening to and understanding the tape before reading the book will provide useful background knowledge so that reading proceeds faster.

Authenticity: Listening to stories is a recreational activity. Many people like to listen for relaxation and pleasure outside the classroom. Listening to a textbook on cassette is therefore an authentic type of language activity as well as being a useful one. For this reason, it may not be necessary to ask students to do more than simply listen and enjoy the story – to listen and react. The cassettes can be treated as ‘talking books’.

1.13. Listening Activities

Dictation: One of the most common listening exercises which have been practiced continually in schools isdictation. One of the positive features of dictation is that it involves the learner, who becomes actively involved with the language. Dictation can become a meaningful and interesting language activity. The teacher must plan carefully. The teacher dictates a number of words very quickly and makes the students to write the words she has dictated and asks them to write a paragraph making use of the words given in dictation.

Listening and Following a Route: In this activity a route map is used and exercises are designed to link the spoken description with the map. This activity can be improvised easily by the teacher. The route she wishes the learner to mark can be traced on her copy of the map. She can then give the learner instructions, adding comments and a brief description. A map of a place they would like to visit as part of a class trip can be given. In this way a real life context is introduced and the activity becomes more interesting.

Listening to a Telephone Call and Writing the Message: Learners at the middle and secondary school are often required to make telephone calls for formal and informal purposes. Listening forms a key element in telephone skills. In this activity the learner is introduced to a situation where one person has to give an important message to her friend. If the third person receives the call that person has to jot down the important message.

Listening to a Sports Commentary:  Another interesting listening lesson is listening to a sports commentary. The learner listens to the commentary for specific information. In this the learner uses background sounds for clues, for example, playing of the band for the march past, applause and cheering of the winner's name, and so on. At times, we may find it useful to use the same listening material for another class by designing a new worksheet based on the listening passage.

Jigsaw  listening: In 'Jigsaw listening' class of students are divided into a small number of groups and each group listens to a different listening text. All the texts are on the same topic, and then the groups exchange information to build up the complete picture. The success of a jigsaw activity depends on each listening text being incomplete in some way which is crucial for the completion of the task, so that the students need to seek details from each other and provide accurate information from their own listening. When there is quite a lot of information contained in the listening texts, it is useful to provide a while-listening activity which requires the students to record, on a chart, points which may need to convey to the other groups at the post-listening stage.

Jigsaw tasks are an excellent way to integrate the skills, as learners read or listen to a text, and speak and listen to others to reconstruct the information in the text. Most written texts can be made into a jigsaw activity easily. Managing a jigsaw listening exercise is more challenging as it requires multiple tape recorders, enough space to listen without disturbing other groups, and time.