12 Language Skills LSRW I (Listening)

Dr. Neeru Tandon

Learning outcome:

This module deals with the Language skills in general and Listening skill in particular. Other three skills Reading, Writing and Speaking will also be discussed. Multiple-choice exercises will help them in assessing their knowledge and understanding of the work. Bibliography, list of websites and You Tube videos will help them in their in-depth study and further reading. Critical quotes and quotes from the book will also help them in understanding various aspects of the module.

Introduction : LANGUAGE SKILLS : LISTENING

God gave us two ears and one mouth so that we can hear twice as much as we say.

Languages are generally imparted and evaluated in terms of the ‘four skills’: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Listening and Speaking Skills are known as oracy and the Reading and Writing are known as literacy; both oracy and literary form linguacy.

Among these four skills, listening and reading are used as the channels of receiving Information. Thus, these two skills are called as receptive skills.

The remaining two skills, speaking and writing, are used as channels of sending information. Thus, these two skills are labeled as productive skills.

Language Skill is the ‘ability to comprehend receptive language and use expressive language to communicate. ‘A student who has good spoken language skills will more easily master reading and writing skills.

Through daily activities, teachers provide learners with opportunities to develop each skill: students listen (to the teacher use the target language, to a song, to one another in  a  pair  activity), speak(pronunciation  practice,  greetings,  dialogue  creation  or recitation, songs, substitution drills, oral speed reading, role play), read (instructions, written grammar drills, cards for playing games, flashcards) and write (fill-in-the- blank sheets, sentences that describe a feeling, sight or experience, a dialogue script, a journal entry). These four skills, as they are referred to, are interrelated because using a language generally requires using more than one skill at a time. However, learners can be more competent in one skill than another. Language teachers must teach students in a way that encourages mastery of all four skills. The research on the skills draws from linguistics, psycholinguistics, psychology and cognitive science.

LSRW: Speaking Skill

Speaking is a creative act where the speaker must have an idea whatever he wishes to express, either introducing the oration, or conversation or responding to former speaker. Speaking skill contains:

• Capability to speak without grammatical errors,
• Knowledge of where, when, why, how and what to speak
• Appropriate pronunciation and ability to present in comprehensible method,
• The awareness of the lexical, grammatical, and cultural features of the language.

Reading Skill

Reading is considered as an understanding of written signs and codes, which consist of recognition and comprehension skills. While reading, a reader interacts with a text, decodes it, and constructs meaning in the process. The reading involves

• The knowledge of the language,
• The knowledge of the writing system,
• Ability to recognize the phonemes,
•  The ability to interpret and comprehended the texts,

Writing Skill

Writing is the process of transporting one’s thought through written symbols. The writing skill includes:

• Capability to shape the letters,
• Skill to convert the ideas using the written symbols,
• Talent to write without grammatical errors,
• Ability to present and organize in a readable fashion,

Listening Skill: A method of understanding the spoken language

Listening is a precondition to other skills of language. The activity of listening is not an act of just recording the speaker’s statements and reciting them as a copycat or as an imitator. It is a method of understanding the spoken language. Listening involves:

• Obtaining the methodical sounds of the language,
• Managing and constructing sounds into words,
• Giving meaning to the words and getting meaning from the words received,
• Capacity to interpret and grasp the speaker’s statements,

Listening is a challenging language skill because listener feels himself under unnecessary pressure to understand every word. As a teacher it is important to prepare students for the listening task well before they hear the text itself. First of all the teacher must ensure that the students comprehend the language well.

Learners hear spoken language before they speak it; many learners exhibit a silent period in their language development when they can comprehend more language than they can produce (Brown, 2001). The importance of listening as a source of input is widely recognized, yet listening, as a discrete skill with its own set of strategies has not always been emphasized in the classroom. In the 1950s and 1960s, students spent many hours in language labs and the classroom completing listening/speaking drills, but the purpose was for students to repeat sounds accurately, not necessarily to improve listening comprehension. In the 1980s, listening became more important with the advent of Krashen’s (1995) concept of comprehensible input, which said that learners need to be exposed to massive amounts of comprehensible language in order to acquire it. Today, with a greater emphasis on the importance of all four skills, listening receives attention in its own right, and the focus in the classroom is on learning how to listen through the application of listening skills and strategies.

Four primary goals for listening instruction are:

• To improve learner’s comprehension of spoken language;
• To increase the quality of learners’ uptake (i.e., the words actually retained) from spoken input;
• To develop learners’ strategies for understanding spoken discourse;
• To encourage learner participation in face-to-face communication (Rost, 2006).

In our first language, we have all the skills and background knowledge we need to understand what we hear, so we may not judge the intricacy and complications of the process. Learners cannot improve their listening comprehension of second language without practice. In our lives the verbal messages are deciphered not only by the spoken words, but also by the situation, the speaker, and visual clues. That’s why students should be introduced to the listening activity within the context of the topic of a teaching unit. Yet the four skills do not exist as separate entities within the language; to the contrary, all of the skills are interrelated. When students are in a conversation, they are not just speaking, but also listening. When students listen to a lecture in class, they may also take notes. At the same time, it is possible for students to be more competent in one skill than another. Students from some language backgrounds may have no trouble reading and writing in English, but find the sounds of the language more difficult to produce. On the other hand, students from orally based cultures may find it easier to speak than to write. Some students can speak a lot, but cannot understand much of what they hear. The task for the language teacher is to provide instruction that facilitates the development of all four skills.

While the four skills are inseparable in terms of their use, research on the teaching of the four skills typically focuses on one component skill with the aim of better understanding the  processes  involved  in the  acquisition  of that  specific  skill.  The research draws upon developments in the fields of psychology, linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science. In the sections that follow, the research and theories related to each of the four skills are presented.

To expand the vocabulary of second Language learner and to improve their listening comprehension, teachers can introduce a lot of listening activities. For example, people know that the largest difference between mother language learning and second language learning is the environment. Most of the students don’t get such congenial atmosphere at home as they learn second language only in formal places and classes.

 12.3 ROLE OF TEACHER WHILE TEACHING ‘LISTENING ‘AS A LANGUAGE SKILL

A competent teacher may make his students comfortable by telling them that they do not need to understand and evaluate every word they hear. The important part is to anticipate what they are going to listen. ‘The teacher can support them more by asking questions and using the illustrations to support students to envisage the answers even before they hear the text. ‘ While listening the students should be able to focus on understanding the message so make sure they are not busy otherwise in trying to read, draw, and write at the same time. Always give a second chance to listen to the text to provide a new opportunity to those who were not able to do the task. Finally, after the activity teacher should invite answers from the whole class. Then play the cassette again/read the text again and allow students to listen again for confirmation. Even if the students appear to have finished the assignment successfully, teacher should always inspire them to listen to the text once more and check their answers for themselves.

To foster better listening skills, teachers need to provide input that is relevant, authentic and not too difficult. Relevancy is important because research shows that for learners to turn input into uptake, they must find the language to be personally significant. White (2006) suggests that students should be allowed to choose what they listen to, and design their own listening texts and tasks. Authenticity refers to whether the language in the listening task is language the student would actually hear in a similar real-world situation. Texts should include examples of pauses, false starts, redundancy, etc. Level of difficulty refers to the overall comprehensibility given many variables such as length, rate of speech, text organization, etc (Rost, 2006).

Teachers should also encourage students to use both top-down and bottom-up processing strategies. Top-down processing occurs when students utilize their prior knowledge to help them understand a speaker. For example, a student may infer what a speaker intended to say given the learner’s understanding of the topic. Bottom-up processing occurs when listeners focus on the sounds, words, patterns, etc. of the language. Rost (2006) identifies two important phonological processes that help listeners identify words in a stream of speech: feature detection and metrical segmentation. Feature detectors are phonological processing networks in the brain that respond to specific sounds. Although children are born with the ability to hear all sound combinations, adults only hear the sounds for their native language(s). This means that adult listeners will experience perceptual difficulties when decoding streams of L2 speech. Metrical segmentation refers to a listener’s use of stress, intonation, timing rules, etc. to turn speech into words. This kind of processing can be improved through training.

Why listening is important

Listening=45 percent

Speaking=30 percent

Reading =16 percent

Writing= 9 percent

For all practical purposes, students (and even teachers) often stop to give listening its due importance. It should not be difficult to comprehend the importance of listening as it occupies about 45 percent of the time adults spend in communication. ‘Listening is the first and foremost language mode that children acquire which provides the basis for the other language arts (Lundsteen, 1979).’

The importance of Listening in the process of acquiring / learning language cannot be underestimated. Any obstruction in the listening action will disturb the linguistic development of other methods. Children effortlessly listen to the language spoken around them and grasp it as their first language within one year right from their birth; afterwards they start taking part in acquiring language skills. But this is not the case with the second language learning, where the listening is willingly made hobby, forced work or curriculum. During this methodical learning, learners are made to involve in listening to L2 where the linguistic tones are imparted gradually.

‘The linguistic items like phonemes, morphemes, lexical items, grammatical items, syntax and semantics are taught to listen in order to develop other modes of language- viz., speaking, reading and writing.’

Listening is also important because it:

• Occupies a big chunk of the time we spend communicating in the language. Think about the times you spend listening to others speak or listening to songs, news, lectures, YouTube, etc. Recent advances in technology have served to raise the profile of the listening skill in language teaching.
• Provides input that can be very significant for second language acquisition in general and for the development of the speaking skill in particular.
• Promotes non-linear processing of language and encourages learners to develop “holistic” strategies to texts.
• Listening enhances good customer relationships. Effective listening is vital to the development of good customer relationships. This can improve quality, boost productivity and save money for the organization. Poor listening can have the opposite effect.

Purpose of Listening

Wolvin and Coakley (1985) delineate five specific purposes of listening as :

• Discriminative listening
• Aesthetic listening
• Efferent listening
• Critical listening
• Therapeutic listening

A. Discriminative Listening

People listen to distinguish sounds and to develop sensitivity to nonverbal communication.

B. Aesthetic Listening

People listen aesthetically for pleasure, to a speaker or reader when they listen for enjoyment. For example: Listening to stories or reciting a poem

C. Efferent Listening

People listen efferently to understand a message, and this is the type of listening required in many instructional activities. Students determine the speaker’s  purpose and then organize the information they are listening to in order to remember them. e.g. Note taking

D Critical Listening

People listen to get information and then to evaluate a message. Critical listening is used when people listen to debates commercials, political speakers and other arguments.

E. Therapeutic Listening

People listen to allow a speaker to talk through a problem.

Listening challenges for English language learners

There are many challenges an individual may face in understanding a talk, lecture or conversation in a second language (and sometimes even in their first language). They may be :

• The speaker,
• The situation
• The inability of the listener

There may be some Causative factors as well. They include:

• The speaker talking quickly
• Background noise
• Lack of visual clues
• The listener’s limited vocabulary,
• a lack of knowledge of the topic,
• and an inability to distinguish individual

Difference Between Written English and Spoken English: Listening in a second language is difficult because spoken language often differs deeply from the grammatically correct written language offered in the classroom. People, for instance, often speak in incomplete sentences or use colloquial language and slang because their purpose or motive is just to communicate. They shrink and downgrade language e.g. ‘Do you want to go?’ turns into ‘You wanna go? ‘In speech, there may frequently be false start, incomplete sentences, different pronunciations etc.   Along  with   these,   listeners   may  have  difficulty  deciphering intonation, stress and rhythm, or understanding speech that has few pauses (Brown, 2001; Mendelsohn, 2006).

One reason that listening English language from native speaker is difficult to understand is that the English in textbooks is very different from how people really speak. People use different words and phrases in spoken English than they do in writing.

• They use
• They say “um”, “hmm”, “ah”, “uh”,
• They skip the word “that” when using relative clauses etc.
• They speak very fluently
• Native English speakers pronounce words differently when they say them together than when you say them one-by-one. This is called “connected  speech”.
• (W’joominehand’nmethabagovethare? (“Would you mind handing me that bag over there?”)

Listening Identified Characteristics

Brown and Rubin (1994) has presented an excellent review of ‘listening identified characteristics’ that affect listening:

• Text characteristics.
• Interlocutor characteristics.
• Task characteristics.
• Listener characteristics.
• Process characteristics.

By way of illustration, here is a brief synopsis of Brown’s characterization of the first of those characteristics, those related to the text itself. It has been shown that a listening text will be easier:

• If there are few speakers and objects.
• If the speakers and objects are distinct and different from one another.
• If the order of telling the events matches the order in which the event occurred.
• If the inferences called for, are those that one would have predicted.
• If the context of the text fits with what the listener already knows (exploiting and existing schema).

LISTENER VS SPEAKER

It is a common belief that the speaker specifies meaning and the listener grasps it, as the speaker conveys it. But if the listener takes direct literal meaning of word instead of contextual meaning, listening becomes irrelevant. Now we may have two meanings, one is speaker’s meaning and the other is listener’s meaning, as understood by him. Co-operation in sending and receiving meaning is important. Here comes the importance of context. Segardahal (1996) has distinguished two types of meaning. ‘One is constant linguistic meaning and the other is varying situational meaning.’

An act of communication requires encoder-the speaker and decoder-the listener. The speaker encodes the concept or message through a set of code.

The listener decodes the concept or message from the set of code used by the speaker. That is, on the one hand, the act of encoding involves cohering the sounds into words, words into sentences, sentences into discourses. On the other hand, the act of decoding involves identifying the sounds, understanding the utterances and their meanings, and recognizing the prosodic features like tone, intonation, pitch, stress, etc. used by the speaker.

For the effective exchange of information, both the speaker and the listener are expected to be equipped with the competence of the language that is used. That is, the same level of competence is expected from the listener and the speaker as well. Any shortcoming in the linguistic competence of the listener or the speaker, would affect the communication. So, both the polarities should be more or less equally equipped with the linguistic competence of that language for effective and efficient communication.

Strategies for Developing Listening Skills 

Effective language instructors show students how they can adjust their listening behavior to deal with a variety of situations, types of input, and listening purposes. They help students develop a set of listening strategies and match appropriate strategies to each listening situation. Listening specifies the auditory input that serves as the basis for language acquisition and empowers learners to intermingle in spoken communication.

Listening Strategies

Listening strategies are techniques or activities that provide directly to the comprehension and reminiscence of listening input. Listening strategies are dependent on listener’s progressions and activities and his contribution.

‘Richards (1990) draws two way process of listening comprehension: bottom-up and top-down processing. ‘Bottom-up process is the use of incoming data as a source of information about the meaning of the message. Top-down process is the use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message.’

Top-down strategies are listener based. The listener uses the circumstantial knowledge of the topic, the situation or context, the type of text, and the language. This background knowledge activates a set of expectations that help the listener to interpret what is heard and anticipate what will come next. Top-down strategies include

• Listening for the main idea
• Predicting
• Drawing inferences
• Summarizing

Bottom-up strategies are text based; the listener relies on the language in the message, that is, the combination of sounds, words, and grammar that creates meaning. Bottom-up strategies include

• Listening for specific details
• Recognizing cognates
• Recognizing word-order patterns

Metacognitive Strategies

Strategic listeners also use metacognitive strategies to plan, monitor, and evaluate their listening.

• They plan by deciding which listening strategies will serve best in a particular situation.
• They monitor their comprehension and the effectiveness of the selected strategies.
• They evaluate by determining whether they have achieved their listening comprehension goals and whether the combination of listening strategies selected was an effective one.

To extract meaning from a listening text, students need to follow four basic steps:

• Figure out the purpose for listening. Activate background knowledge of the topic in order to predict or anticipate content and identify appropriate listening strategies.
• Attend to the parts of the listening input that are relevant to the identified purpose and ignore the rest. This selectivity enables students to focus on specific items in the input and reduces the amount of information they have to hold in short-term memory in order to recognize it.
• Select top-down and bottom-up strategies that are appropriate to the listening task and use them flexibly and interactively. Students’ comprehension improves and their confidence increases when they use top-down and bottom- up strategies simultaneously to construct meaning.
• Check comprehension while listening and when the listening task is over.Monitoring comprehension helps students detect inconsistencies and comprehension failures, directing them to use alternate strategies.

ACTIVE LISTENING VS PASSIVE LISTENING

• ‘It is not enough for students to merely listen to audio assignments. Students must use strategies that make them active, not passive, listeners. To understand the difference between active and passive listening, students need direct instruction on strategies that work’’ (Vandergrift, 1999; Goh, 2008; Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari, 2010).
• To accomplish this, teachers should use time in class to model effective strategies and evaluate students’ use of them. Students who use before-, during- and after-listening strategies develop skills that enable them to monitor their own metacognitive processes. Listening comprehension is the basis for speaking, writing and reading skills. To sharpen listening skills, it is important to listen actively, which means to actively pay attention to what you are listening to.
• To demonstrate good listening strategies, teachers should preselect short audio articles or lecture excerpts that are normally used in their classes and describe for students what kind of thinking they can do before, during and after listening.

12.11 Active Listening Strategies

Before-Listening Strategies

1. Connect : Build connections between what is known related with the topic and what is going to be heard.

2. Predict: Make guesses about what could be learnt after listening. Guessing helps brain focus on the assignment. It doesn’t matter if guesses are right or wrong.

3. Talk About New Words: One should make a list of preselected vocabulary words from the project. If words are new, talk about them with a friend or use a free audio dictionary such as http://www.dictionary.com.

During-Listening Strategies

1. Listen for Answers

Looking for answers to questions gives a reason to listen and keeps mind active and alert. For example, if the title of a speech is “The Science and religion,” Question may be “How can religion be rational or scientific?’ or What is the connection between science and religion?”

2. Take Notes

Writing notes helps in remember ideas. Outlining and layering information is always a good idea, but try other imaginative ways of taking notes: Use connected circles and shapes, create a chart, or draw a map. Use abbreviations and symbols that help you keep up with the speaker’s rate of speech.

3. Re-listen/Find a Fix

The best way to fix things is to re-listen. Sometimes a quick backpedaling and re-listening to a line or two can quickly clear up confusion. If you can’t re- listen, shift to a different listening strategy that helps you regain your focus.

After-Listening Strategies

1. Respond

‘What do you agree and disagree with? What parts do you like best? What parts are confusing? Use symbols, such an exclamation mark (!) before an idea you like or an “X” next to something you disagree with, that help you quickly write your reactions so you won’t forget them.’

2. Summarize

After several readings summarize what the assignment was about In your head, and test yourself on your notes.

3. Extend

Learning more information and other resources makes a topic more meaningful and interesting,

     USE OF TECHNOLOGY FOR LISTENING: ‘With greater access to technology, more options for listening activities are available. Students are listening to podcasts, online lectures, and video clips while completing activities involving the other four skills. Research indicates that students enjoy this kind of learning and find multimodal forms of learning, which involve the use of more than one skill, beneficial for language retention.’ (Patten & Craig, 2007; Smidt & Hegelheimer, 2004).

Technology is one of the most significant drivers of both social and linguistic change. Graddol: (1997:16)

The tradition of English teaching has been drastically changed with the remarkable entry of technology. Technology provides so many options as making teaching interesting and also making teaching more productive in terms of improvements.

In language Listening we have a lot more variety as source to choose from the world of technology:

• Radio,
• TV,
• CD Rom,
• Computers,
• A.L.L.,
• A.L.L.
• The Internet,
• Electronic Dictionary,
• Email,
• Blogs and Audio Cassettes,
• Power Point,
• Videos, DVD’s or VCD’s,
• Language Labs etc.

This rapid rising and development of information technology has offered a better pattern to explore the new teaching model. As a result technology plays a very important role in English teaching. Using multimedia to create a context to teach English has its unique advantages. This method makes the class lively and  interesting, as well as optimizing the organization of the class. Multimedia has its own features such a s visibility and liveliness. During the process of multimedia English teaching, sounds and pictures can be set together, which enhances the initiative of both teachers and students, When using multimedia software, teachers can use pictures and images to enrich the content of classes, and also imagine different contexts in the process of producing teaching courseware, Students in the class can use multimedia to understand the class in a clear way.

Through the whole interactive process, it is apparent that using multimedia in ELT is effective in nurturing students’ interest in learning English, as well as enhancing teachers’’ interest in English teaching. Through Multimedia and network technology we can offer students not only rich, sources of authentic learning materials, but also an attractive and a friendly interface, vivid pictures and pleasant sounds, which to a large extent overcomes the lack of authentic language environment and arouses students’ interest in learning English.

Listening Process

Listening is a complex, multistep process by which spoken language is converted into meaning in the mind” (Lundsteen, 1979:1). Wolvin and Coakly (1985) have identified three steps in the process of listening which are receiving, attending and assigning meaning. In the first step, listeners receive the aural stimuli or the combined aural and visual stimuli presented by the speaker. In the second step, listeners focus on or attend to select stimuli while ignoring other distracting stimuli. Because, so many stimuli surround students in the classroom, they must be attractive to the speaker’s message, focusing on the most important information in that message. In the third step, listeners assign meaning to or understand, the speaker’s message.

Three Phases of Listening Process:

Andreson and Pamela (1986) have identified three phases or stages of listening process-perception, parsing and utilization.

In the perceptual phase, language learners focus on the sounds of language and store them in their echoic memory.

In the parsing phase, listeners use words and phrases to construct meaningful representations. They recognize the formation of words as meaningful units that can be stored in short term memory. The size of the chunk that listeners retain depends on several factors including knowledge of language, knowledge of topic and the quality of the signal.

In the final phase or utilization phase the listener probe long-term memory to connect what they hear with what they already know.

Types of Listening

Galvin (1985) has identified eight categories of listening with due general purpose.

• Transactional listening – learning new information (speeches, debates, political conventions).
• International listening – recognizing personal component of message (new piece of speech, report).
• Critical listening – evaluating reasoning and evidence (news broadcast).
• Recreational listening – appreciating random or integrated aspects or
• Listening for appreciation – information, making critical discrimination or selection.
• Selective listening – selecting certain features at a time (phonetic features).
• Intensive listening – for details (vocabulary, grammar).
• Extensive listening – general idea (stories, rhymes, song.
• Predicting content for Listening: one can often predict the kind of words and style of language the speaker will use. Moreover, when we predict the topic of a talk or a conversation, all the related vocabulary stored in our brains is ‘activated’ to help us better understand what we’re listening to
• Listening for gist= listen in order to understand the main idea of the TextListening for gist can be better understood by one example. When listening, it is also possible to get the ‘whole picture’ but information comes in a sequence with context like (the nouns, adjectives and verbs) that can help you form that picture.

For example, the words ‘food’, ‘friends’, ‘fun’, ‘park’ and ‘sunny day’ have their own meanings, but when you hear  the  words  in  sequence,  they  help  form the context of a picnic.

Listening for details

When listening for details, you are interested in a specific kind of information – perhaps a number, name or object. You can ignore anything that does not sound relevant. In this way, you are able to narrow down your search and get the detail you need. In a listening test, if you are asked to write down the appearance of a girl, listen for the words related to girl (‘how old’, ‘young’, ‘fair’, black, short, height, hair etc.)

Listening for Understanding meaning

Imagine you visit a country whose language is not known to you. There you want to purchase something but the shopkeeper seems to say something apologetic in response. Even though you don’t understand his words, you can  probably conclude  that  he  doesn’t  have  that  article.  This  is the technique of inferring meaning: using clues and prior knowledge about a situation to work out the meaning of what we hear.

These strategies are not stand-alone. While prediction is mostly a pre- listening skill, others need to be used simultaneously to get the best result when listening.

Relationship between Speaking and Listening

Speaking and listening are interdependent processes. The activity of speaking requires at least a listener, an individual or an audience. The speaker speaks keeping certain objectives in his mind. That is, speaking involves conveying meaning using a code and listening involves understanding the meaning with the help of code what the speaker used. If it is transaction, one way listening, the speaker does not receive feedback, but if it is interaction, two- way listening, the speaker receives feedback from the listener. In transactional or conversational discourse, sending-receiving and receiving sending are alternative phenomena.

APPROACHES FOR LISTENING AS A LANGUAGE SKILL

The four skills work in tandem when the activities that require their use are designed to  support  learners  in  the process  of  learning,  creating  and  producing  a  specific product. Four approaches in particular are structured so that the four skills can be used simultaneously. These approaches are: the focal skill approach, content-based instruction, task-based instruction and the project-based approach.

THE FOCAL SKILL APPROACH

The goal  of the focal  skill  approach is  studying in the Second  Language  in order to acquire it. This second language curriculum stresses the balanced development of listening, speaking, reading and writing by measuring competency in each skill and then focusing on the development of the weakest skill.

CONTENT-BASED INSTRUCTION (CBI)

Oxford (2001) describes approaches to CBI, which include theme-based & adjunct learning. Theme-based CBI focuses on a theme of high interest to students and develops a wide range of language skills around that theme. The learning of the content requires considerable exposure to a variety of forms of information, which, in turn, requires the use of all four modalities.

TASK BASED INSTRUCTION (TBI)

According to Nunan (1999), task-based instruction (TBI) uses tasks or stand-aline activities, which require comprehending, producing, manipulating or interacting in the target language. The amount of listening, speaking, reading and writing involved to complete the problem posed by the task is dictated by the task itself; however, most complex (multi step) real-life tasks that take learners into the world outside the classroom will utilize all four skills.

PROJECT-BASED APPROACH

This approach concretizes the integration of not only the four skills but also language, culture, experience and learning strategies (Turnbull, 1999). With the careful selection of a final project that requires learners to demonstrate what they have learned through both oral and written production, the teacher plans backwards to identify what aspects of language, culture, experience and learning strategies are required to complete the end project

PRACTICAL REMEDIES

Listening is the root-cause for the development of other skills of language. Any inadequacy of listening will affect the development of other skills eventually. However the following remedies will be helpful for the L2 listeners.

Teaching listening comprehension may be taught to make them understand a context, how to deduce meaning of an unknown vocabulary in a context, and how to understand the contextual / situational meanings of words.

The tape-recorded dialogues could be played before the students, and they could listen them, then the theme as well as questions may be asked on the basis of the dialogue. This type of practice will help the students’ understanding capacity as well as communicative competence.

Introducing the listening games like sound discrimination (k, g, kh, gh), Recognition of minimal pairs (put, but), Recognizing morphemes (free and bound morpheme), Recognizing syllables in words, Recognizing silent letters in words, identification of parts of speech etc. will help to build up listeners ability to discriminate L2 phonemes, morphemes and phonetic variation of sounds.

The students can be made to listen to different current vocabularies and allow them to write down the synonymous and antonymous words for those vocabularies. Further, practice of finding equal L1 words for L2 as well as translation of sentence from L2  to L1 and vice- versa will help to develop the linguistic competence of the students.

Watching TV programs, films and listening to radio programs will certainly help to understand how the native and non-native speakers use the English language. It will help them also in understanding the dialectal variations of the language.

Observing public announcements (Railway announcement, corporation transport announcement, etc.) will help to strengthen the sociolinguistic knowledge and the presence of mind.

Guidelines for Effective Listening

• Listening, as a process, can be improved if the receiver takes an active role. The best way to improve is to listen to English a lot. There’s no way around it; you have to spend hours and hours listening to people speaking English. Listen to things that interest you. If you don’t enjoy something, it’s going to be hard for you to continue.
• Interactive listening is best. It’s better to talk with someone than just to listen to a recorded TV show, radio program, or podcast. When you talk to people live, you listen more carefully, and you also think about how you’re going to respond.
• Don’t just listen to the same kind of English all the time. Expose yourself to a variety of different kinds of situations and topics.
• Try listening even if you are unable to understand anything.
• Prefer English captions to subtitles in your native language. When you read subtitles in your language, it keeps your brain locked into “native language mode”. English subtitles are good, though. They help you to match words that you know with their natural pronunciations.
• Live and work in a completely English-speaking environment.
• Do some kind of sports, hobbies, or other activities with a group of English speakers or you can listen English commentary if you are a cricket lover, instead of Hindi one.
• Talk face to face with an English teacher at least a few times a week. Try to listen him/her and imitate.
• Concentrating on the message: Keeping concentration upon what is being said and avoiding distractions and mind-wandering, which result in blank patches, will enhance effective listening.
• Keeping an open mind: When listening, one should not allow biases to influence (listening) it. Asking question: Being ready to ask questions or provide a remark which, causes the speaker to explain or amplify a point (to) aids the listener’s understanding of the message.
• Listening especially attentively for points and sections of personal importance or relevance: this is to ensure that actions and personal follow-up requests are fully and clearly understood before the speaker rings off, departs or a meeting is closed.
• Providing a regular feedback (response which) indicates that the message is (still being) received and understood. Responses such as: “You‟re right, I quite agree” ensures effective listening.

Reference

• Bloomfield, L.(1993).Language, George Allen of Unwin Ltd: New York.
• Brown, G.(1995 b). Speakers, listeners and communication: Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
• Brown, H.D. (2001). Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language pedagogy. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.
• Holec,H.(1981). Autonomy    and    Foreign    language    learning.    Oxford:Pergamon.
• Goh, C. (2008). Metacognitive instruction for second language listening development: Theory, practice and research implications. RELC Journal, 39, 188–213.
• Vandergrift, L. (1999). Facilitating second language listening comprehension: Acquiring successful strategies. ELT Journal, 53, 168–76.
• Vandergrift, L., & Tafaghodtari, M. H. (2010). Teaching L2 learners how to listen does make a difference: An empirical study. Language Learning, 60, 470–497.
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