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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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Listening
Definition

▪ 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 Listening
Five 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 Listening
Five 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
 Phonetics
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▪ 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 Language
Second Language
Foreign 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.