Listening and Reading- Passive Skills no More!

Swati Rai

'Effective Communication skills' is more than corporate speak, being rightfully acknowledged as a key 21st century learning skill. In English language communication, we speak about the four main skills of learning the language effectively to communicate, wholly. Listening, Reading, Speaking, Writing-of which, the first two are clubbed under the ‘receptive’ and the last two under the ‘productive’ skills, sets.

The ‘Passive’ skills of reading and listening are christened so, as there is no overt production of language in these two, unlike when one is writing or speaking. While all four skills have a symbiotic relationship, yet the oft neglected are the passive skills, due to their nature of receiving the language, rather than producing it, making them less conspicuous.

The two skills have now come under sharp focus in the era of white noise of social media, fake news, pandemic outbreak mandating remote collaboration, with the emphasis on Emotional Quotient, reading between the lines and more importantly, on the key skills of analysis, deliberation, responding versus reacting and mindfulness in communication.

 Listening Vs Hearing

 At a time when technology has invaded the human space like never before, communication is not left untouched. Our text messages have gone voiced, seminars have gone online, our books morphed audio bytes and in the 24x7 connected world our earphones have some or the other earworm being belted out- be it a podcast. This, augmented with a proliferation of multiple social media sites, in addition to the existing ones, with audio input as the main stay to connect on grounds of common humanity globally, has made listening perhaps one of the most important survival and life skill.  

 Training on listening skills should include an understanding of the difference between mere hearing as against listening. While the former is an involuntary, reception of voice akin to hearing the traffic noise when walking on a busy road, as against a conscious, concentrated listening to a text to understand, process, assimilate and act upon it. This mandates the training on the sub-skills or the behaviours that are required to be adept in each skill of language learning. ‘Listening for gist’ is one such sub skill, where the listener looks out for the overall import of the text. Other sub skills of listening skill that need attention are listening for: specific purpose, to infer information, for text patterns and listening for language items.

  Focused Listening Training

A key subskill for clear listening is a comprehension of how connected speech features, like contracted forms, (I am-I’m), of how sounds change by way of elision and assimilation and in weak forms.  Elision is a way of making the text easier and quicker to say, by omitting sounds or words.  For instance, Aptly becomes /aply/ in speech with ‘t’ sound missing. Assimilation is when one sound becomes more like a sound nearby it. In the case of the word ‘handbag’ that is pronounced as /hambag/ in connected speech.  Similarly, weak forms are way of speaking with less stress and time spent in the enunciation of the vowel sounds in function words, such as prepositions and articles as against the content or meaning words. All these aspects require ear training to assimilate the entire meaning, internet and force of the spoken word. Along with this training on the understanding of intonation to convey different meaning is also a must include.  

 ‘Reading maketh a Full Man..’

 It’s a no brainer that passive skills feed into the productive skills of language production. However, they can’t be neglected at the cost of stressing upon the two productive skills of speaking and writing. Reading is one such skill that is coming into focus now as a force multiplier in reflection, analysis, vocabulary enhancement (guessing the meaning of words from the context)  inference. At a time when attention spans are short and distractions longer, skim reading a text quickly to get a general idea of what it is about or scanning it quickly to pick out specific information; is a must. For those short on time, a car or a metro commute read of predicting and recognising links will come in handy. As the need for digital and media literacy grows, ascertaining a link’s safety and security of access, along with identifying a text type and the purpose for reading, is a must. These skills require a dry run in the training room, especially at a time empathetic ear and reading between the lines, to separate the wheat from the chaff, is a life skill!

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