Confluence 26 February 2011

How to be a good listener

In order to be or to become a good listener, it would be worthwhile, if the learner paid special attention to individual sounds and collective meaning, is attentive to the content and main theme, tries to focus on the key aspects of the listening passage, text or the dialogue, does not ignore verbal cues, acoustic cues of stress, tone and intonation, listens for minor details and implied message and attempts to stay focused until the end of the exercise.

It can be re-emphasized that a good listening comprehension exercise should make a learner:

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  Understand the meaning of new words.
  
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  Respond to simple questions.
  
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  Follow instructions and directions.
  
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  Decode the stylistic variation in spoken language.
  
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  Infer the content from simple conversation.
  
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  Recognize the characters in dialogue forms.
  
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  Repeat the pronunciation clearly and intelligibly.
  

Conclusion

To sum up, listening and speaking are two sides of the same coin and careful listening and interpretation helps the learners to nurture the ability to link up the phonemes together to form syllables, the syllables together to form morphemes and words, and the words together to form larger units of phrases, sentences. As the Sociolinguist Dell Hymes has pointed out, the skill of communicating develops through a process of articulating sounds, understanding them, developing adequate vocabulary and developing the competence in sentence formation, which he called ‘Communicative Competence’ (Hymes, 1974). This is the competence of the language learner to converse fluentlyy and correctly in a given situation and to respond to different types of speech acts such as requests, apologies, greetings and invitations. In short, this is the culmination of different aspects of learning into a successful conversation. A mention here can be made of familiarity of standard phrases and idiomatic expressions which refine the use of language apart from contributing to the attaining an impressive level of proficiency. Thus constant listening practice ensures spontaneity and fluency to mark excellent spoken skills, besides adding to learning different genres of speech acts, like formal conversation, presentations, debates and discussions, lectures and informal chatting.