Listening Skills

Ø  Definition of listening Skill.

Listening is the ability to accurately receive messages in the communication process.  Listening is key to all effective communication, without the ability to listen effectively messages are easily misunderstood – communication breaks down and the sender of the message can easily become confused.

Listening involves observing body language and noticing inconsistencies between verbal and non-verbal messages. For example, if someone tells you that they are happy with their life but through gritted teeth or with tears filling their eyes, you should consider that the verbal and non-verbal messages are in conflict, they maybe don't mean what they say.  Listening requires you to concentrate and use your other senses in addition to simply hearing the words spoken.

Ø  How Important Is Listening Skill.

Learning to listen is an important skill. You can improve your listening skills just as you improve any other skill - see the link below for more information.

·         Listening is important because you can learn new information through listening.

·         Listening also includes paying attention to the person speaking, so you can also pick up on body language, gestures, expressions, and other non-verbal clues to help you understand what they are saying.

·         Listening is also polite, and it helps you to get along with other people.

·         Listening is a virtue, something that not everyone has. It gives you an insight of other persons thoughts and their behavior, and which in turn makes dealing easy with them. Sometimes just by listening you can help people reason with themselves and deal better with their emotions. And the most important of all it gives you other persons perspective of the problem or the situation.

In both education and non-education Listening is so important to learn, there are some linguists has argued about it:

·         The best way to improve speaking ability is listening practice and later on the learner’s fluency comes out of such drills automatically (Postovsky, 1974).

·         Listening plays and important role in second language instruction for several reasons (Rost, 1994)

From the linguists opinion there we can conclude that listening ability is useful skill, not only important skill but also this skill will followed the others skills.

So that is enough reason why listening is more important than the others skills (Reading, Speaking and Writing).

Ø  Problems of Listening Skill.

Listening skill isn’t an easy skill to learn, there are problems in Listening skill, namely:

·         The listener can’t control how fast the speaker should talk.

·         The listener cannot have the speaker repeat his utterances that the listener fails to understand in real-time situations other than classrooms.

·         The listener’s limited vocabulary becomes obstacles to listening comprehension as the choice of vocabulary depends on the speaker.

Ø  Solutions of Listening Problems.

From a sources that I found there are keys to be well listening. This is list a series of micro-skills of listening, which calls enabling skills. Namely:

·         predicting what people are going to talk about

·         guessing at unknown words or phrases without panic

·         using one's own knowledge of the subject to help one understand

·         identifying relevant points; rejecting irrelevant information

·         retaining relevant points (note-taking, summarizing)

·         Recognizing discourse markers, e. g.,well; Oh, another thing is; Now, finally; etc.

·         Recognizing cohesive devices, e. g., such as and which, including linking words, pronouns, references, etc.

·         understanding different intonation patterns and uses of stress, etc. , which give clues to meaning and social setting

·         Understanding inferred information, e. g., speakers' attitude or intentions.