Listening Skills - How Important Are They?

Listening is perhaps the most neglected of the language skills. Reading and writing are associated with academics and therefore many exercises are built around them. Speaking is a necessary part of communicating with others in the classroom, and so that too, becomes an obvious teaching choice. Both writing and speaking are ways of assessing progress, because they result in particular ‘products’. But what about listening, without which meaning could not be communicated? How much teaching time should we be spending on explicitly developing listening skills? How are good listening skills linked to independent learning? Justify your answer.

After reading the above paragraph, I reflected on my teaching experiences which include teaching English language arts (L1) in elementary schools. Most, if not all activities had some listening component to them. Some activities involved students listening to instructions, repeating the steps in their own words, and then proceeding with the activity. Other activities relied on listening in order to learn a strategy. For example, when teaching students to make connections (text to person), they listened to a story and then told how something in the book reminded them of something that happened in their lives. The same was done when teaching text to text and text to world connections. The initial lessons to teach these strategies were listening centered activities. Eventually students apply the strategies to reading comprehension. Writing skills were also taught through listening and speaking related activities. After reviewing a week of lessons that I taught, it was easy to determine that listening was extremely important in all language arts classes.

I think teaching listening strategies to students learning English as a second language is as important as learning to apply the strategies in their first language. Students may or may not have learned listening strategies in their first language and if they did they may not be using them to learn the L2. For example, students may use the strategy of writing down relevant information from a message or text in their L1, however, may need specific instruction on applying that to their L2. Therefore, I think it is important to spend class time explicitly teaching these skills.

Another benefit of teaching listening strategies is that they will eventually be used to advance skills in other language modalities. For example, practicing the strategy of listening for transition points such as ‘on the other hand’ or ‘in conclusion’ will enhance students’ speaking, reading, and writing skills.

Students will become more independent learners as they increase the number and variety of listening strategies that they can use in their daily lives. For example, learning how to ask for clarification and listen for salient points will increase confidence, risk-taking and learning.

It is difficult to determine how much class time should be spent explicitly teaching listening activities since I have never taught English as a second language. However, based on my teaching experiences with English as a first language and the fact that it is one of four language modalities, I would assume approximately one quarter of the time should be allotted to teaching listening skills in an ESL classroom.