Exposure to the nuances of a silent art

THE AVERAGE college student spends about 15 hours a week listening to (or may be just hearing, for there is a difference) lectures. Through the normal course of a day we listen to almost twice as much as we speak and four or five times more than we read or write (Rivers, 1981).

Listening is a critical element in competent language performance and yet it remains the least known, left untaught because it cannot be tested''. Developing listening skills is a challenge at every level of language learning and use.

In the West, ``the skills'' approach to language learning advocates that listening is the first skill required to be mastered.

However, the situation in India is found to be the reverse, as exposure to hearing English is almost always limited to the classroom - in regional language schools in the English period only.

The typical Indian gets to listen to English as the last input, long after s(he) has learned how to read and write the language and tried with that knowledge, with appreciable success, to speak, using the limited and often inaccurate inputs from the English teacher in the form of ``A for apple''.

Listening is a demanding process, not only because of its complexity but also because of factors that characterise the listener, speaker, the message content and environment. Interest in a topic increases the listener's motivation to listen. Listening is further facilitated if the listener has some background knowledge of the subject of discussion.

It is also important to recognise and build negotiating skills to further listening such as asking for repetition and clarification which enable the listener to decode incoming information.

The speaker's colloquialisms, slang, accent and sentences often left incomplete, make listening difficult.

Learners need to become familiar with different speech habits and accents to find clues and decipher meaning.

Listening is not a passive skill as some experts have called it. There are several different processes at work. These processes work sequentially and simultaneously in rapid succession, or backwards and forwards as needed. The listener determines a reason for listening,

1. takes the raw speech;

2. and creates an image to deposit in the short-term memory;

3. attempts to organise the information and message;

4, predicts inputs;

5. recalls schemata (background information) to interpret message;

6. assigns meaning to content;

7. checks comprehension;

8. determines information for long-term memory;

9. deletes original form of message that has been received into short term memory (Dunkel,1986).

All data points to the criticality of motivation, providing learners with a purpose for listening and accessing material that will hold interest.

Further, the language of discussions and exercises should reflect the authentic language of real discourse, including hesitations, rephrasing and the variety of Indian accents.

Teachers should avoid using activities that rely on memory or that merely drill. They should focus on the processes of listening and develop the student's ability to listen for meaning, and with interest and comprehension. A pre-listening exercise to activate schemata followed by the listening task supported by post-listening tasks for integration with other skills is a classical formula for effective listening skills development. Classroom instruction and listening to lectures provide an excellent opportunity for students to perfect their listening skills but the ground rules will apply in all real-life situations.

For good listening, listeners must:

* Maintain eye contact with the speaker

* Focus on content, not delivery

* Avoid emotional involvement and reactions

* Avoid distractions. Treat listening as a task in itself and a challenging one

* Remain tuned in by making mental notes and asking silent questions to yourself.

Most importantly, remember that you can think faster than the speaker can talk.

So use the gap between the rate of speech and your rate of thought to increase your capacity to listen, think and ponder at the same time, a process that is made possible for ourselves with radio, cinema, TV and computers that require practice and attention.

LAKSHMI RAMESHWAR RAO

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