Listening

LISTENING

Listening skill holds the key to effective communication. It is an important factor in communication. It is a voluntary activity where the listener has to listen with keen interest.

Listening challenges

People may face certain difficulties in understanding a talk or lecture.

·        Speaker talking quickly

·        lack of visual clue

·        Poor vocabulary

·        lack of knowledge

·        Inability to recognise individual sound.

1.Skills involved in listening:

Our knowledge about the world help us to predict the information. The vocabulary stored in our brain gets activated as we listen to a particular topic. For example when a teacher talks about weather you can predict that the teacher will be using words like sunny, cloudy, windy, rainy, storm.

2. Listening for gist:

When a speaker speaks, the content is delivered in an order. Listening the noun, verb, adjective in a sentence helps the listener to a form a picture ad. This is called as listening  for gist.

3. Listening for details

In order to collect certain details from a lecture we can ignore the irrelevant matters and get the information which sounds relevant. For example listening to a biography we can just collect the information that are relevant to us, like name, age, place etc

4. Inferring meaning

Using clues and prior knowledge about a situation we can infer the meaning of what we listen. We can understand the relationship between people from the words they use. For eg. If a person use the words saree, price, we can infer that this conversation is taking place between a shopkeeper and  customer.