Listening Skills In Interpersonal Communication

Nowadays, in the rapid globalization process, ability to speak foreign languages is known as a big advantage. In almost language centers, communicating courses have a remarkably prominent place among language programs. Now that English is an international language, it is the effective means to communicate with people from all over the world in Vietnam. When studying a foreign language, many students find listening and speaking harder than reading and writing. However, of the four language skills, listening is usually regarded as the most difficult one. According to many researches, people spend a lot of time listening in comparison with other skills and listening is also one of fundamental skills in interpersonal communication. To develop

Among the key principles and strategies that can be learnt and taught are practicing with some particular techniques, listening for gist, listening for specific information, predicting and 3-stage teaching.

In fact, listening is a capability to hear and understand what other people say. As Harmer (2007) states “What a good listener is able to do is to process what he hears on the basis of the context it occurs in”. Although listening is one of receptive skills, it is not easy to listen well if language learning and teaching strategies are not used properly. As many language linguists believe practice is crucial to make progress. Every language skill in general needs time-consuming. According to Harmer (2007), practice frequently is a key to boost listening ability. In our folk, people say that: “study must be accompanied with practice”. Thus, students need to listen as much as possible since the more they listen, the better they are. They can listen whenever, wherever and whatever they like such as authentic

It is also important to develop speaking and listening skills together because most of the time in real life these skills are needed at the same time. In addition to speaking, teachers can ask students practice writing a topic related to the listening. Thus, combining those skills will help prepare students for listening situations in real life where several skills often need to be used simultaneously. Harmer (2007) suggests “live listening” can be applied for listening lesson instead of using audio material story-telling, interviews, and conversations. Adding to that, Doff mentions that “using English for chatting to the class, for giving instructions and explanations” will provide students with very useful listening practice.

Moreover, games can be applied in the class before finishing or starting the lesson. If teachers have enough time, they can let class play games at the end of the lesson, otherwise, they can use for the beginning new lessons to review. The advantage of doing these types of listening activities is that it makes students more interested in listening, especially when teachers divide the class into teams as competition remarkably increases students’