Listening is a skill which involve receiving message in spoken form and thereforeoften referred to as receiptive skill. Eventhough it is assumed as a receptive skill, it needs an process to decode the message from the speaker. The listener must be active to process the information listened from the speakers.
Listening is the skill in second language learning. By stressing the role of comprehensible input, second language acquisition research has given a major boost to listening. As points out, of the four language skills - speaking, listening, reading and writing, listening is the most critical for language learning at the beginning stages. Therefore, nowadays listening is assuming greater and greater importance in foreign language classrooms. The teaching of listening has attracted a greater level of interest in recent years than it did in the past.
Listening is one of the receptive skills and as such it involves students in capturing and understanding the input of English. Reading, the other receptive skill, involves students in understanding and interpreting the written word. Listening is probably more difficult than reading because students often recognise the written word more easily than they recognise the spoken word. Furthermore when reading, students can go back and reread a phrase whereas with listening they only get one chance. With reading, it’s the reader who sets the pace whereas with listening it’s the speaker or recording that sets the pace.
Because of these issues, many students find listening difficult. Listening tasks can be very disheartening and demotivating, especially if students have had a previous negative experience. It is therefore important to give our students plenty of opportunities to practise the skill of listening in a supportive environment that helps them to learn. We need to design tasks that help them learn rather than merely testing their abilities. This means that we guide them through the recording, pre-teach language and highlight the essential points of the recording. This is in contrast to testing, where the teacher simply plays the recording and the students listen and answer questions.
However, careful observation of the practice of teaching English in universities has found that the teaching of listening skills is still a weak chain in the language teaching process. Even though students have mastered the basic elements of English grammar and vocabulary, understanding they are often weak. Through a systematic study of basic English teaching stages at universities, recognized that while the integrated skills of students in reading, writing, translating has increased, the ability to hear and speak they have been left behind. The key factors that have been recognized in preliminary studies are understanding listening to limited students. Furthermore, listening in other languages is considered a heavy job.
