Topic: Importance of Listening Skills in Language Development.

Listening plays an important role in language acquisition as it contributes primarily for language expertise. This skill creates awareness of the language as it is a receptive skill that first develops in human beings. Until the late nineteenth century the focus was on reading and writing skills in the class rooms and then onwards listening began to gain its importance in the learning of language. Learning to listen to a language improves the language ability. The basis for communicative competence is listening because the aural input happens and enables the listener to interact in spoken form and this leads to language learning. Therefore, listening skill is considered as the foundation for complete language proficiency.

Background

The new strategies contributing to effective listening and the widespread availability of technology have helped to overcome the challenges in teaching listening and enhances the listening skill of the learners. But still teachers find it difficult to provide effective listening activities to learners in the classroom. It is proved that the learners gain 45%of language competency from listening,30% from speaking,15% from reading and 10% from writing. When this skill is compared to other 3 skills learners find it a bit difficult because of its interrelated skills like receiving, understanding, memorizing, evaluating and responding.

General Concerns

The common areas that need effective strategies for training of listening skill are:

-control over the speaker’s speed of speech

-listener’s limited vocabulary

-lack of concentration

-problem of interpretation

-phonetic variations

The main reason that generates confusion and stress among the learners are the interpersonal and interpretive modes of communication in which he/she has to actively participate. Here the skill is not at learner’s control and the speed varies. The listening activities often fail to be interactive, interpretive processes where the students have to apply both their prior knowledge and linguistic knowledge in understanding messages. The learners should be exposed to activities that make them move to greater knowledge, awareness and control of one’s learning, selecting strategies, monitoring the progress of learning, correcting mistakes, observing the success rate of learning strategies, trying various strategies.

The key questions within the topic:
Introduction
How to develop language competency through listening?
What are the ways to develop listening confidence?
How to gain better comprehension (largely controlled) through listening?
What are the practices that contribute to the ability of identifying difficult sounds, words and phrases to support listening comprehension?
What is active listening and passive listening?
How to overcome poor listening?
How to improve concentration during listening activity?

-Why do some educators think that there is a need to bring initiative based on listening activities into the classroom?

-How can we learn to listen for the main idea?

-What are the effective strategies that can be used to summarize the listed matter?

-Is predicting possible while listening?

-How to concentrate on specific details while listening?

-What are the ways by which we can recognize word-order patterns?

-How listening helps in terms of self-awareness?

-What is the difference between listening and hearing?

-How to gain a full and accurate understanding of the matter?

-What are the barriers of effective listening?

New insights

Listening is crucial not only in language learning but also for learning all other subjects. Even today with all the technological advancement educators are not able to provide apt learning materials and that is the reason why learners suffer with this skill. The time spent for this activity is not sufficient and the materials provided are mostly inappropriate. Inadequate physical settings also contribute to poor listening comprehension. Knowing the context of a listening text and the purpose for listening greatly reduces the burden of the comprehension. Teachers have a major role and responsibility in their classes and can provide a better atmosphere for listening activities. They monitor the learning process and evaluate the listening activities. Teachers should assist their learners in every stage and should help them towards predicting missing information. Listening comprehension lessons should be carefully and gradually planned. It should start from simple lessons and gradually proceed to complex while learners get in language proficiency. These tasks should focus on conscious memory tasks. The main purpose of these activities is to reinforce learners’ recall to increase their memory capacity. Listening, thinking and remembering are interconnected and it is impossible to separate.

Listening is a very important skill because it provides input for the learners and without comprehending input students cannot learn anything. This skill should be developed consciously. Proper guidance will help the learners in the process of listening and provides them with the knowledge by which they can successfully complete and put them in control of the learning.Listening skills should not be disregarded in the language classrooms and teachers should be aware of and should try to address and minimize listening comprehension problems experienced in by the students.