Receptive skills plan: Receptive skills – Listening and Reading

Listening

Long-term career prospects are closely tied to employee’s ability to listen and as a result it should be developed by the student, a prospective employee. Listening is consensual activity and cannot be enforced. It is considered an ability to identify and understand what others say or speak. This involves understanding a speaker’s accent or pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and gauging the meaning. It is a language experience that operates in contexts ranging from simple conversation to academic discussions. “Listening (author’s name) for perception and listening for comprehension are the two broad activities under which the micro skills could be practiced.”(Kottacheruvu, 2014) Although listening is an imperative key to language success, unfortunately it has been thrown on back seat for teaching reading and writing in the classroom. John Field aptly remarks:
“There has been a bias towards comprehension approach, in which the main task is to answer questions about specific piece of text. In doing so we are treating listening as a product, rather than a process. We’re looking at the answers which students give, rather than the process they use to get these answers.” (Field 2008)
The progressive skill for a student could be listening for problem solving, summarizing, answering questions, interpreting information, filling gaps, paraphrasing etc. Besides, as our main aim is to prepare the students for real-life social interaction, social listening could also be one of the skills. There is also a need to learn how to think about and respond to what we listen to; because we often take part in social interaction and face-to-face conversations. Therefore, and direct teaching of the skill followed by organized, sequential practice has to be assimilated in the second language curriculum. Moreover, the root of many problems faced by students is the diversity of pronunciation and meaning of functional and content words in isolation and in connected speech in English. Inappropriate decoding ruins his understanding and hence, they should be provided with adequate decoding practice to strengthen their comprehensibility of the content. As Y. Sreenivasulu and R.V. J. Kasyap puts it:

“Learners require a model of the target language to reproduce, a kind of Standard English, which is systematic in training. Teachers with such good model, play an essential role in teaching right pronunciation. The more a teacher cares his own pronunciation the better a learner cares and learn it. They will automatically mend their own pronunciation at the college level if they get a chance to listen to it regularly in the classrooms.” (ijellh.com/papers/2014)