LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 12 : 8 August 2012
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Helping Students from Socially Disadvantaged Backgrounds to Develop Effective Listening Skills

R. S. A. Susikaran, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D. Candidate

Abstract

Higher secondary education focuses on the writing and reading skills alone where speaking is not the ultimate aim of the English teacher. Unlike other skills, listening skill remains unattended to and needs to be developed throughout the academic career. The problem of poor listening skills of the learners in the beginning stage of education continues with the same degree of negligence and inadequacy at the tertiary level too. This paper identifies the ways to develop this skill.

The focus of this paper is to find out the reasons of poor listening ability among the socially disadvantaged students. Listening is a complex interactive process where listeners actively interpret what they listen to. The inability in recognizing the sound, word meaning, structures, stress and intonation may affect the efficient mastery and use of language.

Socially disadvantaged learners have greater difficulty in listening to English utterances and find it difficult to respond to communications addressed to them (Van Avermaet 2006). This research article surveys the problems related to the acquisition of listening ability and provides some solutions to these problems.

Introduction

What are the main ingredients in Listening skills? (1)

• Intensive: Listening for acuity of the components (discourse, phonemes, words, intonation, markers, etc.)
• Responsive: Listening to a comparatively small stretch of language (comprehension, check a greeting note, questioning & interrogation, commanding & imperative, etc.)
• Extensive: Listening to develop a large-scale perception of spoken language. Like listening to a lengthy conversation, lecture, dialogue or purpose.
• Selective: Dispensation of discourse like short monologues. The need is not necessarily to look for general meanings, but to comprehend the selective information in a context of communication.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

R. S. A. Susikaran, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D. Candidate
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Oxford Engineering College
Tiruchirapalli 620013
Tamil Nadu
India
sukirtha_27@yahoo.com
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