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LISTNING SKILLS

Lois Jose

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Listening

▪ Listening is a valuable skill and has critical importance in one’s

personal, academic and professional setting.

▪ Good listening skills help to succeed in his/her personal as well

as professional life.

▪ It is needed to get into a profession in communications,

management, planning or sales.

▪ Good listening can reduce misunderstandings and hostilities and

leads to better problem solving skills

▪ Listening is a very important skill in language learning

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ListeningDefinition

▪ Listening is the active process of receiving, constructing

meaning from, and responding to spoken and non – verbal

messages

▪ Listening is the ability to identify and understand what others are

saying.

▪ Listening involves comprehending a speaker’s accent and

pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and the meaning intended.

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Listening Vs Hearing

▪ Listening is a conscious activity and involves one’s auditory,

mental, visual and physical faculties, while hearing is a passive

act involving one’s physical process and function of perceiving

sound.

▪ Listening is primarily an activity of mind and it requires focus and

effort, whereas in hearing, mind is not actively involved

▪ Unlike hearing, listening is a skill that improves through

conscious effort and Practice

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Process of ListeningFive Stages

▪ Hearing : The listener hears something and the sound waves

stimulate the sensory receptors of the ear. The person perceives

the sounds.

▪ Understanding and Recognizing: The listener recognizes the sound

patterns and understands the meanings attached to them. Past

association with the sounds helps the person to understand them

quickly. A conscious effort is made to decipher the meaning and

context.

▪ Interpreting : The listener starts decoding the message further.

He/She employs her own values, beliefs, needs, ideas etc., to

interpret the speaker’s message

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Process of ListeningFive Stages▪ Evaluating: The listener critically evaluates the message and

assesses its accuracy, reliability, feasibility, strengths and

weakness. The possibility of bias or prejudice is also explored

▪ Responding: The listener responds by means of verbal and non-

verbal feedback. Acceptance, rejection, understanding,

confusion or indifference is shown through verbal and non-

verbal cues

▪ Remembering: The listener has not only received and

interpreted the message, but has ‘added’ it to his/her mind. This

helps to retain information for future reference.

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Barriers to effective listening

▪ Psychological Barriers:

▪ Inability to pay attention due to closed mind or lack of interest in the topic.

▪ The listener can be preoccupied, tense or exhausted.

▪ Emotional Barriers:

▪ Beliefs and Attitudes

▪ Fear and Anxiety

▪ Semantic Barriers

▪ Difficult words and phrases

▪ Different accents

▪ Complex grammatical structures

▪ Speed of Speech, Pronunciation

▪ Monotonous voice, jargons etc

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Barriers to effective listening

▪ Socio-cultural Barriers

▪ In the age of intercultural communication, different accents from

different cultures can pose a major problem.

▪ Physiological Barriers

▪ The physical condition of the listener can affect the concentration

and restrict the amount of information taken in.

▪ The environmental distractions

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Enhance listening skills

▪ Maintaining eye contact and asking feedback questions help in enhanced

listening.

▪ Avoid physical distractions

▪ One has to listen with an open mind to understand the thoughts of the

speaker.

▪ Empathise with the speaker and try to understand the speaker’s point of

view

▪ Reading is vital to improve listening skills. Develop the habit of taking notes

▪ Listen to the language as often as you can to familiarise with the language.

▪ Summarise after every lecture.

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Types of Listening

▪ Active Listening and Passive Listening

▪ Active Listening happens when the listener gets involved consciously in the

process.

▪ Active listening is done through both verbal and non-verbal cues.

▪ Non-verbal cues include smile, posture and eye-contact

▪ Verbal signs include positive verbal encouragement, remembering details,

clarifying, summarising, and asking encouraging questions.

▪ Mirroring is another method where the listener mirrors the expression of the

speaker

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Phonetics

▪ Linguistics: It is systematic study of language.

▪ It describes language in all its aspects and formulates theories as to show how it

works.

▪ Language: Language is the system/means that help one to communicate with

their fellow beings.

▪ In a wide sense, language is used to mean the specialized sound-signaling system

which is developed in humans to communicate with each other.

▪ Phonetics: It is the branch of linguistics which deals with the scientific study of

speech sounds.

▪ Articulatory Phonetics deals with the production of speech sounds

▪ Acoustic Phonetics deals with the transmission of speech sounds

▪ Auditory Phonetics deals with the reception and perception of speech sounds

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Why Phonetics

▪ Studying/learning phonetics is important in language learning as

it helps in understanding sounds distinctively and in familiarising

the basic sounds of a language and the way it is spoken.

▪ Recognising basic sounds in a language and how it is different

from other languages help in improving the language proficiency.

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English- Lingua Franca

▪ Lingua Franca means World Language

▪ World language is a language that is spoken internationally and is learnt and

spoken by a large number of people as second language.

▪ English is a widely spoken language and is referred to as world language.

▪ It is used as first language of UK, USA, Australia and Canada

▪ It is used extensively as second language, and in common wealth nations it

is used as official language.

▪ So English as a lingua franca is the use of English language as “a common

means of communication for speakers of different first languages”

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First LanguageSecond LanguageForeign Language

▪ First Language:

▪ A first language/ native language/ mother tongue is the language that a person has

been exposed to from birth or with in a critical period.

▪ Second Language:

▪ Second language is not the native language of the speaker, but is used in the locale of

that person. It can also be defined as any language learnt in addition to one’s native

language.

▪ Foreign Language:

▪ It is a language originally from another country and is not spoken commonly in the

native country of that person referred.

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Varieties of English

▪ A language is often characterised with many varieties of speaking

that differs from the standard variety of the language.

▪ Variations can be based on region, social class and levels of

formality.

▪ Many a times, people who belong to specific academic or

professional group, tend to adopt jargons that is known to and

understood by only members of that particular group. Such

variations can cause communication barriers.

▪ A dialect is a regional or social variety of a language distinguished

by pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary

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Varieties of English

▪ As English has become world language, different varieties of

English has also risen. Some such varieties are British English,

American English, Canadian English, Australian English, South

African English, Indian English.

▪ All varieties of English share the same basic tenants of the

language, but differ in certain words, phrases or linguistic

constructs.

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Indian English

▪ Indian English: The variety of English used by Indians

▪ There are many varieties of English spoken in India like Telugu English, Punjabi

English, Malayalam English, Tamil English etc.,

▪ This is because of the mother tongue interference.

▪ Interference of mother tongue cannot be avoided as the majority of people learn

English as a second language. i.e., They are learning English after their speech

organs got tuned to the sounds of their mother tongue.

▪ This influence of mother tongue is clearly visible in the spoken form and actual

pronunciation.

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GIE – General Indian English

▪ When the common phonological features of the different

varieties of English in India are put together, removing the gross

regional differences, the variety of English emerged can be

termed as general Indian English.

▪ It is the standard variety of English spoken by the educated

Indians all over the country.

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GIE

▪ Many Indians mispronounce individual sounds like /z/ /v/ /w/ etc.

Many English vowels and diphthongs are also mispronounced.

Many a times suprasegmental features such as stress,

intonation and rhythm is ignored by Indian Speakers. They tend

to give uniform stress on all the syllables of a word, as is

generally done in Indian languages.

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Received Pronunciation (RP)

▪ It was Daniel Jones, the reputed phonetician who gave popularity to the term

‘Received Pronunciation’.

▪ By the term he meant the form of English that is most widely accepted and

readily understood and which could be made a standard of pronunciation in the

entire English speaking world.

▪ This form of English is usually heard in the every day speech of the Southern

English families whose menfolk were educated in great London public schools.

▪ It is also referred to as Oxford English or BBC pronunciation.

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Received Pronunciation (RP)

▪ Though it is not common among the majority of English native speakers, it

enjoys a prestigious and privileged position as BBC uses it. Educated and

cultured class also prefer this variety. Therefore it is now recognised as

Standard English Pronunciation and is regarded as correct English.