What is Listening to Skill? Listening to news report for Gist. is here in this post
Table of Contents
What is listening?
Listening is the first communication skill acquired by everyone. It is an invisible mental process that plays a vital role in daily lives. People listen for different purposes such as entertainment, academic purposes, or obtaining the necessary information.
There are many definitions of Listening proposed by many experts
- Listening is the activity of paying attention to and trying to get meaning from something we hear (Underwood 1989).
- It is the ability to identify and understand what people are saying (Yagang, 1993).
- This involves understanding a speaker’s accent or pronunciation, his grammar and his vocabulary and grasping his meaning, Howatt and Dakin in Saricoban (1999).
- Listening is also an active process which requires the listeners to participate in that process (Yang 1999).
- Vandergrift (2002) adds that listening is a complex, and active process of interpretation which listeners match what they hear with what they already know.
- Based on theory of communication, Rost (2002) views listening as a part of transactional process in which all participants are simultaneously ‘sending’ and ‘receiving’ messages. He says definitions of listening are based on four orientations or perspectives. First, from the perspective of receptive, listening is viewed as receiving what the speaker actually say. Second, from the perspective of constructive, listening can be defined as constructing and representing meaning. Third, viewed from collaborative perspective, listening is negotiating meaning with speakers and responding it. Fourth, from the view of transformative perspective, it means creating meaning through involvement, imagination and empathy.
Process of listening
Listening is an internal process. Some experts describe what happens as we listen. According to Underwood (1989) there are three stages of aural processes.
- The sounds go into echoic memory for a very short time to be organized into meaningful units according to the knowledge of the language the listener already has.
- The information is then processed by the short time memory. In a matter of seconds, words are checked and compared with information already held in the long-term memory and meaning is extracted.
- The meaning extracted is stored in the long-term memory for later use.
Flowerdew and Miller in Amelia (2011) describe the process of listening as follow: Auditory messages are first received by the sensory memory from the environment around us. The sensory memory activated, and the message is held for a period of not more than one second. In this period, the message is held in its exact form. Then depending on a number of factors, such as the quality of messages, the urgency of the messages, and the course of messages, it is either passed on your short term memory or lost.
Wilson (2008) distinguishes the process of listening comprehension into two categories; bottom-up processing and top-down processing. Bottom-up processing refers to the listener’s decoding of the incoming message by analyzing it at the level of sounds, words and sentences. Top-down processing refers to the listener’s use of background knowledge such as previous knowledge of the topic, situational or contextual clues, schemata or script stored in long term memory. However comprehension can only occur when the listener can place what is heard in a context.
What are the four listening levels?
Listening is about others. It’s about giving them what they want and need. It’s about connecting with others on many different levels.
Four levels of listening:
- an attentive presence,
- clarifying and interpreting meaning,
- providing empathy
- acting generatively.
What are the steps to develop effective listening skills?
Here are 10 tips to help you develop effective listening skills.
• Step 1: Face the speaker and maintain eye contact. …
• Step 6: Wait for the speaker to pause to ask clarifying questions.
What are the listening strategies?
Listening strategies
- Listening for gist: you listen in order to understand the main idea of the text.
- Listening for specific information: you want to find out specific details, for example key words.
- Listening for detailed understanding: you want to understand all the information the text provides.
What does listening for gist means?
Listening for Gist is when the learner tries to understand what is happening even if he or she can’t understand every phrase or sentence. The learner is trying to pick up key words, intonation, and other clues so as to make a guess at the meaning.
Broadcast News
There are two kinds of media used for broadcasting news.
Structure of News
Semi (1995) states other structure of the news story.
Similarly Suparyo and Muryanto (2011) say that the structure of the news consists of news worthy or news lead, background events and sources. News worthy or news lead is the summary of the news and background event tells about what has happened, for whom and how. Sources are the comments from the actors, witnesses and the experts in the events.
Listening to the News
Ur (1984) summarizes six features of most real-life listening. Not all of these are relevant for listening to the news.
Impact of Different Media
There is no doubt that listening to radio news is a much greater challenge for the learner. TV news on the other hand, provides visuals which give the learner clues to what is being said. Not all learners make the most of these supports. It is important for the teacher to provide students with opportunities to practice developing non-linguistic strategies such as predicting, so that they can make the most of their schematic knowledge.
Learner Problems in Listening
Underwood (1989) identifies the problems Encountered by listeners as;
Problems in Listening by experts Basquille (2012) says the problemsy Encountered by listeners in listening to the news are more than others. When listening to the news, the learners will encounter some difficulties because on television news, there is often strident background music playing while the news headlines are being read. The speed of delivery can be quite fast and of course there is no possibility of asking the speaker to repeat or clarify. However there are certain factors which should be less problematic. For example the range of the topic is quite limited and the students should be able to predict to some extent what they will be if s/he listen to the news on a regular basis. Many learners believe that their greatest difficulty with listening is their inability to control the speaker’s speed (Underwood,1989).
Besides the above problems, learners still have problems identifying sounds and words. Although the news is clearly articulated, some problems with connected speech cause difficulties. One of such difficulty is assimilation i.e. the blending of words at their boundaries (Basquille, 2012). Field in Basquille points out that learners often fail to recognize a known word when they hear it in continuous speech because the end of the word has been modified.
Goal of listening to news
- The goal of assigning students with this task is to train them with the ‘challenging’ listening material and finally they are expected to improve their listening ability.
- There are several reasons why students are asked to listen to the news.
- News stories are short, usually lasting for 3-4 minutes each.
- News stories provide students with various topics on events happening around the world.
- News stories provide students with various accents of the news readers.
- News stories introduce students to new vocabularies and expressions set in natural context. – News stories provide the integrated skills of language. – News stories can be got and recorded easily.
- The students will get a chance to listen to the correct English pronunciation.
- The students will become familiar with various accents of English.
- The students will become skillful in understanding unfamiliar words, phrases and sentences.
- The students can enrich their vocabulary, since the news provides a wide range of vocabulary.
- The students are skillful in mapping their minds, especially related to what they have listened to, which is important in listening comprehension.
- The students have also a lot of practice to listen to the ‘normal’ speed of the speaker (news reader) even though it is hard for first few weeks.
- Assigning students to listen to the news is aimed to improve their listening ability
