Listening- a macro skill in language learning

CONCLUSION
To conclude, it can be said, without listening skills, language learning is impossible. This is because there is no communication where there is no human interaction. Also, listening is crucial not only in language learning but also for learning other subjects. But even today, with all the technological advancements in the field of education, learners have problems with listening. The main reasons are: they spend too little time to improve their listening skills; the inappropriate strategies tested on them in a learning setting may be an important reason for their poor listening comprehension. The problems are also caused from the listening material and physical settings. To acquire high level listening skills, more exposure is given to the learners with variety of listening comprehension. Knowing the context of a listening text and the purpose for listening greatly reduce the burden of comprehension. Listeners can use both bottom-up processers (linguistic knowledge) and top-down processes (prior knowledge) to comprehend. Teachers should play an important role in teaching learners strategies and how to apply them into the listening task. They can help students develop sound strategies for comprehension through a process approach to teach listening. These are some suggestions to overcome the challenges in listening as well as to upgrade the listening skills of students.
There are many types of listening activities. Those that don't require learners to produce language in response are easier than those that do. Learners can be asked to physically respond to a command (for example, "please open the door"), select an appropriate picture or object, circle the correct letter or word on a worksheet, draw a route on a map, or fill in a chart as they listen. It's more difficult to repeat back what was heard, translate into the native language, take notes, make an outline, or answer comprehension questions. To add more challenge, learners can continue a story text, solve a problem, perform a similar task with a classmate after listening to a model (for example, order a cake from a bakery), or participate in real-time conversation.
For a long time, a focus on listening in teaching and learning has been overshadowed by the other three ESL/EFL (English as a Second Language/English as a Foreign Language) skill "pillars"— reading, speaking and writing. Describing this pedagogical deficiency, Flowerdew and Miller noted, "Listening has often been described as the ‘Cinderella skill" Since listening is a receptive skill (as opposed to the productive skills of writing and speaking), it has often been erroneously labeled as a passive skill. Such a characterization, of course, is inaccurate. Helgesen defined listening as "an active purposeful processing of making sense of what we hear. Rost defined it as "the mental process of constructing meaning from spoken input" (p. 279). Besides being underestimated, listening is arguably the most difficult language skill. ESL listeners have a very limited influence on the speech stream they hear and listen to. Except for the heavily adapted, beginner-level listening exercises, the process is a constant rush of the mind. As Henrichsen noted, "Another important difference between listening and all the other language skills—speaking, reading, and writing—is the amount of processing time available". Techniques like attending to body language, comprehension checks and confirmation checks can be used only by ESL learners in interpersonal listening. Further, in most cases, repeated comprehension checks will lower the native interlocutors’ willingness to maintain communication. In some situations (e.g., during a lecture, or an exam, or in a movie theater) such checks are impossible.