Developing Effective Listening Skills
By Prof (Dr) Shefali Bakshi
Good listening is one of the most significant skills to have in today’s multifaceted world. Families need good listening to face complicated stresses together. Corporate employees need it to solve complicated problems quickly and stay competitive. Students need it to understand complex and composite issues in their fields. Much can be gained by improving listening skills. Students need it to understand multifaceted issues in their fields. All the students who develop good listening skills can take up employment after the XII stage as Call Center employees, Medical Transcriptionists, Legal Transcriptionists etc. So developing listening skills must be incorporated in our daily school syllabus at all levels. There are two ways of Listening:
(1) Casual Listening: We listen with no particular purpose in mind, and often without much concentration, like listening to music while doing some other work.
(2) Focused Listening: We listen for a particular purpose, to find the information that we need to know. In past, Listening took the garb of Dictation. Today, it is a new methodology for an age-old exercise. In the latest trend, Listening Tasks are of three types: (i) Pre-Listening Task, (ii) While-Listening Task and (iii) Post-Listening Task. In the previous years, Dictation was the process of developing Listening skills. For example, One has to connect the relation between the sound and the spelling. A learner who hears the sound /s/ during a dictation/while-listening task can write:
s, ss, se, ‘s, c, ce, sc, st, sw, ps, etc.
Look at these words with sound /s/: Us, Pass, Promise, John’s, Recite, Once, Science, Listen, Sword, Psychology. Thus, deciphering the accurate letter needs not only previous knowledge but also correct listening skills. The integration of listening and speaking skills has been projected very effectively in a series used today called ‘Buzzword’ by Orient Blackswan with very attractive images to motivate learning among the primary level. All the activities are in form of communication, so that learners use the language. The topics are known to the learner and reinforce not only the known but also the unknown. The listening activity is rightly followed by the activity of Speaking skills as listening is a receptive skill, which takes on to the productive skill of Speaking. The pronunciation of the words is developed and then used in communication by solving an activity of filling the blanks with appropriate words. Thus language is developed in communication form so that our learners are trained to use the English language in the outside world. Michael Webb, (March, 2006) rightly mentions: “We can make a difference in the world by learning to listen better and by telling others about better listening. But only if they listen.”
Prof (Dr) Shefali Bakshi is the Deputy Director at Amity School of Languages. She has done a Project on “A Study of Verbal Interaction in Waiting for Godot” for the M.A. degree and has ompleted her PhD thesis on “A Study of Verbal Interaction in the plays of Samuel Beckett” for the Degree of Ph.D. at University of Lucknow, India. She has conducted over 75 workshops on ELT in various parts of India for school teachers and principals.
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