Explain the inter-relationship of language skills. How does the classroom environment affect them?
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Answer:
The significance of Listening skill in effective communication has been recognized for a century. Rankin (1926) conducted a study and found that listening skill was the most dominant skill for the mode of human communication. However, there were no more similar studies until the 1940s. The base of listening inquiry was primarily laid academically in the late 1940s and the founders (James Brown, Ralph Nichols and Carl Weaver) of the listening skill were considered as the “fathers of listening” (Vocile, 1987). Listening skill was taken into the second and foreign language research field in the mid 20th Century and many researchers put listening as the focus of their studies. After half a century, a professional committee International Listening Association (ILA) was established in 1979 to develop listening skill (Feyten, 1991). Knowing how to entail listening instruction and assessment in the school syllabi was the main target of the pedagogy. Steven (1987) pointed out that many studies provide a focus on either understanding listening comprehension or listening critically – agree or disagree with oral input. Similarly, Floyed (1985) defines listening as a process entailing hearing, attending to, understanding, evaluating and responding to spoken messages. He further believes that listeners should be active participants in communication process. The nature/purpose of listening skills varies as the context of communication differs. Wolvin and Coakley (1988) propose five different kinds of listening.
First, discriminative listening helps listeners draw a distinction between facts and opinions.
Second, comprehensive listening facilitates understanding oral input.
Third, critical listening allows listeners to analyse the incoming message before accepting and rejecting it.
Fourth, therapeutic listening serves as a sounding board and lack any critiques, e.g., advising.
Finally, appreciative listening contributes listeners to enjoy and receives emotional impressions. All the varieties of listening help to demonstrate that listening is an active process rather than a passive product. The authors define the process of listening as making sense of oral input by attending to the message. Thus, this study adopts the second definition of listening – understand the oral input mentioned by Wolvin and Coakley as a tool to evaluate the research assumption. The current study seeks to delve into the correlation between listening and other skills in International English Language
Testing System.
Language development involves four fundamental and interactive abilities: listening, speaking, reading and writing. The attempt has widely been made to teach four macro skills in second and foreign language for more than 60 years. Berninger and Winn (2006) emphasize that external and internal environment interacts with functional systems to extent, which the nature-nurture interaction at birth evolves over the course of time. The question is how much and how long the basic skill of listening gains attention in second and foreign language learning while listening is recognized to play a significant role in primary and secondary language acquisition (Ellis, 1994; Faerch & Kasper, 1986). In the 1970s, Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) method was introduced to develop language learning proficiency. Some prominent researchers (Asher, 1977; Krashen, 1992) highlighted the significance of listening in the pedagogy. Krashen (1992) has argued that language acquisition highly depends on the decoding process of making sense of incoming messages. Language acquisition never occurs without access to the comprehensible language input (Rost, 1994) because in addition to visual learning, more than three quarters (80 %) of human learning occurs through listening direction (Hunsaker, 1990). Returning to language acquisition, Nunan (2003) suggested that listening is the gasoline that fuels the acquisition process. Thus, the main reason experts emphasize the significance of listening in language acquisition is the frequency of listening in language development. However, much of the relevant research incorporated into listening as an inevitable medium to drive primary and secondary language acquisition. What is more, none of them focuses on the relationship between listening skill and other language skills – speaking, reading and writing in English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The current research study aims to fill this gap by providing empirical data obtained in a large-scale investigation of 1800 participants taking the international known language proficiency test – IELTS administered in the capital of Iran, Tehran.
