Four Skills

English has become a multi-trillion dollar language and it occupies the number one position as a world language. It is the best job generating language. It is the medium of instruction in all higher education institutions. Mastering of it assures academic achievement and professional growth. After the ushering in of IT revolution, English has got a new status and it cannot be compared wit any other world languages. The growth of it is phenomenal and trade and commerce cannot be possible without the use of it.

India can think of becoming a super power only by teaching and learning of English in the proper way. Linguistic poverty rules the minds of teachers and students in the English class rooms. They have to change their mind set towards enhancing their linguistic fluency and proficiency. Experts in linguistics observe that any foreign language can be learnt within two hundred hours or six months. On the contrary our students take more than two thousand hours and more than ten years and yet find it difficult to learn to speak in English.

Indian teachers adopt wrong methods of teaching and they never teach the students self- learning and speed-learning strategies. The students don’t know how to use a good dictionary and thesaurus. For learning English the following methods are available.  

1.       Children’s method or Natural method ( Three to five years)

2.       Business man’s method   or Learning the language by mixing with the native speakers) ( Six  months to one year)

3.       Russian method or Total immersion  ( one month to three months)

4.       Army method (One month)

5.       Class room method ( no time limit) and

6.       Integration of these methods (As yearly as possible)

The last one is the best for quick results to learn English. Communication skills involve the following four sub-skills of learning.

1.       Listening

2.       Speaking

3.       Reading and

4.       Writing

Among these four skills the teachers encourage students to use only reading and writing. The other two key skills remain unused and the benefit of it is unknown to Indian students and particularly to rural students. Hence the present book emphasizes an integrated approach in learning “Spoken English”.

Learn the sounds

Nature begins from her centre - the seed,

Art begins from its centre - the point,

Man works with his centre - the Brain,

Education revolves round its centre - the language.

Learn the sounds; learn the language.

Active listening

Active listening is a communication technique that requires the listener to understand, interpret, and evaluate what they hear. The ability to listen actively can improve personal relationships through reducing conflicts, strengthening cooperation, and fostering understanding.
When interacting, people often are not listening attentively. They may be distracted, thinking about other things, or thinking about what they are going to say next (the latter case is particularly true in conflict situations or disagreements). Active listening is a structured way of listening and responding to others, focusing attention on the speaker. Suspending one's own frame of reference, suspending judgment and avoiding other internal mental activities are important to fully attend to the speaker. - Wikipedia

Listening Skills - often forgotten skills

The Listening Skills (an all too often forgotten skill set)

Listening skills are often divided into two groups:
• bottom up listening skills and
• top down listening skills
Bottom up listening skills, or bottom up processing, refers to the decoding process, the direct decoding of language into meaningful units, from sound waves through the air, in through our ears and into our brain where meaning is decoded. To do this students need to know the code. How the sounds work and how they string together and how the codes can change in different ways when they're strung together. And most students have never been taught how English changes when it's strung together in sentences.
Top-down processing refers to how we use our world knowledge to attribute meaning to language input; how our knowledge of social convention helps us understand meaning.
These are the skills that listening teachers should be teaching in their classes but all too often are not. (Unless of course you are already using our listening textbook!!!) To offer a quote: "An understanding of the role of bottom-up and top-down processes in listening is central to any theory of listening comprehension" (Richards, 1990:50). We agree.

The Default Method

In most classrooms around Japan, the common way to teach listening is to have students listen to some language tape, then the teacher asks a few comprehension questions. Did the students understand? No? Well ok, play the tape again. Ask the question again. Did they understand? No. Ok, well . . . tell them to practice and one day they'll get used to English and will be able to understand. Practice practice! Practice makes perfect.
Or you might pick out a particular grammar point. This passage uses the present perfect quite a bit, so you might go over some of the differences between the simple past and the present perfect. Maybe write a formula or two up on the board. This is the approach taken by most teachers and it is insufficient.
This might very well be a good grammar lesson but it's not listening. Students need to be told how English works and also how to use their knowledge to improve their skills. Yes practice makes perfect. But instruction can make this process happen much more efficiently. We need to teach our students.
Well known SLA (Second Language Acquisition) expert Richard Schmidt, has put forward a theory called the "Noticing Hypothesis", which states that learners have to notice something before they can learn it. And as such, we need to help our students notice language points. Teachers need to teach.
"There is support in the literature for the hypothesis that attention is required for all learning. Learners need to pay attention to input and pay particular attention to whatever aspect of the input (phonology, morphology, pragmatics, discourse, etc) that you are concerned to learn" (Schmidt: 1995)
An ideal listening class should thus provide both practice and instruction. Students need practice in listening for meaning and also some instruction about how to do so effectively.
"Classroom data from a number of studies offer support for the view that form focused instruction and corrective feedback provided within the context of communicative programs are more effective in promoting second language learning than programs which are limited to a virtually exclusive emphasis on either accuracy or fluency". (Lightbrown & Spada)

- Courtesy ABAX ELT Publisher

Teaching Listening Better - ABAX ELT Publishers

Teaching Listening Better: Is Listening being taught as well as it could be?

In Listening classes, students are usually given practice in listening but they are not actually taught listening. Practice is not enough.
Research and case studies have told us many things about how listening should be taught. But often, this knowledge has not made the jump into classroom practice. While many classes are based on the idea of giving students lots of practice with English, research tells us that we also need to teach listening.
In addition to giving students plenty of listening practice. We should also break the skill of listening into micro-skill components and make sure that our students are aware of what they need to know to understand how to listen to English.

                                  - Courtesy ABAX  ELT Publishers

Ten sub-skills of listening

There are many sub-skills of listening and the following are very useful for students.

1. Be silent
2. Be active
3. Have Interest
4. Attention
5. Concentration
6. Imitation
7. Note-making
8. Memorizing
9. Reciting
10. Thinking

Any student following these sub-skills in the class room can master the subject in the class room.

Learn the power of Listening

Listening is a sub-skill of learning and there are more than 150 sub-skills of listening. It is a passive skill and so it's very boring. More than 70 percent of our time is spent in listening and the students do it in the class rooms. A technical graduate spends above 2000 hours in the class room listening to English lectures. They get an excellent environment to learn both Spoken English and Technical English. If they learn how to learn by listening they can learn everything in the classroom itself. Unfortunately they are not taught how to learn by listening.

Listening is the best self-learning technique and the speed learning technique.