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Receptive skills – Listening and Reading Listening Importance: Receptive skills for engineering students
INTORDUCTION
In the recent scenario, two words ‘Globalization’ and ‘Industry’ have become compatible to each other and hence, a global engineer must be able to easily cross national and cultural boundaries, which consequently affects engineering education. One of the greatest and most common failures of English language teaching in India is that what the student is being taught, is totally inadequate for dealing with the flurry of auditory stimuli coming at him from all directions while he first sets foot in professional environment. In this context, an official website of U.S. Small Business Administration notes: “ Social, political, and financial events continue to change workplace conditions in industry form year to year, so the job market you read about this year might not be the same market you try to enter a year or two from now. However, you can count on a few forces that are likely to affect your entry into job market and your career success in years to come.” (www.sba.gov/) The shift of focus from the teaching of language as a system to the teaching of language as communication has brought the four language skills-listening, speaking, reading, and writing- into prominence.
Under this backdrop, professional engineers certainly need effective and impressive receptive skills for continuous learning as well as career. There is a growing expectation that university teaching should have a global touch to meet the standards of industry and ought to deliver global engineers equipped with not only sharp expressive skills but also with receptive skills. As a result, there has been certainly a need for reframing, restructuring and rethinking about the inclusion of tactics of language in teaching content and methodology for university students.
Receptive skills – Listening and Reading
As far as receptivity is concerned, it is the most common human trait, as with the birth itself; the child starts receiving various impressions through its senses. Traditional notion of listening being a passive activity and speaking as the most active, has become obsolete now, since the decoding of the message calls for an active participation in the communication between the participants. Brown states “Listening ability lies at the very heart of all growth, from birth through the years of formal education the better those learning skills are developed, the more productive our learning efforts”. (Vennum 1987). Extensive listening to the ‘real’ as opposed to purpose-written English is very satisfying since it demonstrates that the student’s efforts in the classroom will pay bonuses in life in an English-speaking environment. As Broughton says:
“It is perfectly possible to hear, but not listen. Similarly, it is possible to listen but not understand. A technical lecture on nuclear physics is beyond the grasp of most people, regardless of the simplicity or difficulty of language it is couched in. Listening for meaning, therefore, is an important skill to develop, but it goes without saying that the actual content of the message should be within the intellectual and maturational range of the student.” (Broughton, 1978)
Extensive listening of this type helps him considerably. The materials he hears need not of course be only a representation of what is already known. Another receptive skill is reading, a thinking under the inducement of the printed page and is considered a psycho linguistic predicting game. It must be recognized that reading a receptive skill in written mode too, is a complex skill that is to say that it involves a whole series of lesser skills.
On one hand, listening and reading are receptive (but not passive) decoding skills aiming at understanding; on the other, speaking and writing are productive, encoding skills. But there is less imparity and more parity among them. The concept of intensive reading and extensive reading in target language is well established.
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