Listening Skills

Listening skills are essential for learning languages since they enable students to acquire insights and information, and to achieve success in communicating with others. Life within and outside classroom offers many listening opportunities, but some students fail to seize them because they may concentrate on what they want to say themselves rather than on what a speaker is saying. Listening can be crucial in some situations and it is important that EFL learners develop their listening skills. The aim of this article is to highlight the problems that may interfere with listening comprehension and to suggest some solutions to them. To facilitate listening tasks and improve the learners' listening skills the teachers should enhance their positive

Everyone needs to learn the English language in order to get in touch on an international level. Speaking English helps us to communicate with people from countries all over the world as it is the language of politics and diplomacy, science and technology, business and trade. In fact, as it is so dominant in international communication, we find more information regarding nearly every subject if we can speak this language. Communication requires integration of all language skills: speaking, listening, reading and writing, of which listening is of primary importance as it is one of the fundamental skills in language acquisition. It's no wonder that in recent years the language teaching profession has placed a concentrated emphasis on listening, as it is considered to be a major component in language learning and teaching. Naturally, there are obstacles that make listening, which is a general purpose in most learning situations, difficult, as it is more than merely hearing words. As G.Buck states, "listening is a complex process in which the listener takes the incoming data, an acoustic signal, and interprets it based on a wide variety of linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge", i.e. listening is the ability to identify and understand what others are saying /Buck, 2001: 10/. This involves understanding a speaker's accent or pronunciation, his grammar and his vocabulary, and grasping his meaning. An effective listener is capable of doing these four things, but a beginner finds it very difficult as he/ she can have no control over the structural and lexical range of the speaker to whom he/she is listening. Nevertheless, any listener can learn to focus on significant content items if he/she learns to listen selectively. In listening