Listening skills are the skills you use to listen effectively and succinctly. This can improve their communication skills, as well as their ability to understand complex texts and concepts. Listening & reading are receptive skill some time known as passive skill. Study suggest Listening occupies about 45 per cent of the time adults spend in communication. This is significantly more than speaking, which accounts for 30 per cent, and reading and writing, which make up 16 per cent and nine per cent respectively.
Here are some advantages or Benefits Of good listening skills: Build trust, Reduced conflict, Reflective Listening, Conflict resolution, Communication, Decision Making, Helps you understand others, Listening Increases your productivity, Empathy, Anticipating problems
There are many difficulties an individual may face in understanding a talk/Listening, lecture or conversation in a second language (and sometimes even in their first language). Contributing factors include the speaker talking quickly, background noise, a lack of visual clues (such as on the telephone), the listener’s limited vocabulary, a lack of knowledge of the topic, and an inability to distinguish individual sounds.
There are a few skills or ‘strategies’ that Developing listening Skill:
Active listening skills such as making eye contact and asking questions. The listening process is explained as having five stages: receiving, understanding, remembering, evaluating, and responding
(I) Listen/Watch and analyzing: Listen to internet radio station like BBC, Watching TV shows in English, recorded TV programmers or clip from YouTube. Depending on the context – a news report, a university lecture, an exchange in a supermarket – you can often predict the kind of words and style of language the speaker will use. Our knowledge of the world helps us anticipate the kind of information we are likely to hear. Conscious listening opens many possibilities for listening styles thereby helping one learn different techniques and approaches to shaping listening style and quality. Moreover, focusing on the way sentence is structured and Language employed.
Tip: Practise predicting content. When you learn new words, try to group them with other words used in a similar context. Mind maps are good for this.
(II)Practice writing/Communicate on various topics: Try to find decisions from the web about things that the student finds interesting and start communicating there with other people using English. Group work is an activity for the development of listening and speaking skill for the student of elementary primary level. In class 4 onward, the teacher implemented fear and group work in English. When a pair/group will be playing the specific roll through role reversal, other will be listening to them, giving support if required. Thus, both listening and speaker go on simultaneously, exchanging communicative approach to the learners. Gradually, the learner will mature into good speaker and ready to face any non-native communicative situation.
Example: debate a topic, 4 member group debate, and communication between two students Encourage students to keep a diary
(III)Brainstorming ideas and creating an outline: Brainstorming is a key part of the listening process. This enables one to speed up their listening thereby creating better lecture.
(III)Give learners opportunities to read aloud: Giving learners the opportunity to read aloud enables them to hear how punctuation and sentence structure combine in the sentences they read. It may even help them to think more deeply about perspective as they read from the point of view of new characters
