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Integrative Skills Of Listening Skills

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Every English language student is expected to master the four language skills: reading, writing, listening and speaking. Among these, listening is a greatly integrative skill and it plays a vital role in the process of language learning, promoting the rise of other language skills since it is the first skill students are exposed to. It is a receptive skill which involves taking in information through the ears, processing and understanding the message and its importance and giving feedback. Actually, listening is the most common communicative activity in daily life, since people listen twice as much as they speak, four times more than they read, and five times more than they write (Morley, 1991:82). In spite of its importance, teachers appear to avoid teaching the listening skill to their students and focus only on speaking, writing and reading skills. Listening is commonly viewed as the most challenging skill both to learn and teach, because of its temporal nature, the complexity of the listening processes and the special features of spoken language (Ur, 1984). What is more, the constrained class time, lack of resources at …show more content…

Hearing refers to the “physical perception of sound, while listening is a complex combination of hearing, seeing, comprehending and interpreting communication” (Battel, 2006). In this sense, listening goes far beyond the natural and involuntary hearing process. It involves paying attention to the message while making an effort to understand it. The aim if this active skill is to interpret information and act upon it. In the EFL classroom, it is widely assumed that listening leads to learning since it is the main source of input. Besides, learners listen before learning to speak, write or read. Though teachers and textbooks acknowledge this skill as the fundamental one in language learning, it is usually given minimal class time or overlooked

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