Understanding listening as a language skill

1. Listening Skill
Manjeet Yadav

2. Listening is a difficult thing to be taught. It
is done through discriminating among
words and their sounds and then
processing and evaluating the message
involved.
Also, non-verbal cues needs to be
evaluated.
In addition to the above, emotional aspect
is also very important. It involves
speaker’s expression, speaker’s stance,
social setting and learner’s expectations.
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3. Listening involves two major
processes:
Decoding
Meaning making

4. Decoding
Process of translating the sounds in the form of
Language.
Words
Phrases
Sentences

5. Decoding Process
At the following levels:
Phoneme
Syllable
Word form
Chunk
Syntax
Intonation
Meaning

6. Sub-Skills of Listening
Perception Skills
Language Skills
Using Language of the World
Dealing with Information
Interacting with Speaker

7. Perception Skill
Discrimination between sounds
Identifying sounds
Recognising words
Recognising intonation patterns
Identifying syllables

8. Language Skill
Identifying words
Identifying phrases
Identifying discourse
Constructing meaning

9. Using Language of the
World
Using knowledge about the topic to estimate
what speaker is saying.
Connecting words to non-linguistic features like
gestures, expressions etc.

10. Dealing with Information
Understanding the main points
Understanding the gist
Understanding the details

11. Interacting with a Speaker
Recognising speaker’s motive
Recognising speaker’s attitude
Ability to cope-up with the variations like speed
of speaking or accent
Predicting the next

12. Successful listening involves:
Recognising the grammatical units
Relating the message to one’s own background
knowledge
Splitting speech into meaningful units
Identifying and interpreting intonation, stress
and rhythm
Interpreting gist
Using background knowledge
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