Study Skills for Higher Education

This article discusses the 5 key listening challenges faced by higher education students and provides effective strategies that teachers can use to support students improve their listening competencies. The challenges include rate of delivery, long sentences, unnecessary words, technical terms, and abbreviations. The suggested strategies include questioning, breaking long sentences into short notes, using meaningful and small sentences, avoiding technical terms, and providing listening tasks to students.

SKILLS FOR HIGHER
EDUCATION

INTRODUCTION
In the recent time for purpose of obtaining higher education, it is essential for students to
developing set of skills through which they obtain expected outcomes in term of high scores. The
current assignment will explain key five challenges that a student face while taking higher
education. Lastly, it will also define five suggestion in term of strategies that teachers can use to
support students improve their listening competencies.
QUESTIONS
1- Discussing five of listening challenges
Effective listening is quite important for each person, especially students, because it made
them capable to get knowledge about varied topics which their lecturers effort to teach. By
referring to article, scholar faced 5 key listening challenges, which may put negative impact on
their further activities in the context of higher education (Jiang and Chun, 2021). These obstacles
are;
Rate of delivery-
It is one of the most common listening challenges or issues that students face during
procedure of getting higher education within university where they study and effort to achieve
academic goals (Usmonova, 2020). It happens within many education organizations where tutors
habit or the way they teach create challenge for listener to understand what actually they teach to
all. It can be said that the speed of delivery words put impact on listening ability of a person. Fast
teaching speed may put negative impact on understanding efficiency of students, due to this
activity, they are unable to comprehend a topic that discuss in class room. It also unable scholar
to obtain proper understanding about subject and use information in the future.
Long sentences-
Another challenge that students face and deal to overcome is current one. This issue
occurs due to long sentences, which create problem to listen what tutor said and try to teach
related to specific topic. Long sentences may always seem to meaning less because it takes times
to comprehend by listeners (Baron and Mangen, 2021). It encompasses varied elements like full
stop, sentences, etc, which is not that easy to understand. It can be said that long sentences make
readers and listeners work to hard. It does not deliver appropriate form of understanding among
students, which may put negative impact upon their growth, study, success and efficiency. This
element requires more focus and effort, which is not possible to do so all the time.

Unnecessary words-
Active listening is quite challenging task because it requires a lot of patience,
concentration and good sentence framing. Any king of unessential word or symbol that change
the meaning of a sentence, which students are unable to comprehend. They make sentence
understanding much complicated that is totally not suitable for higher education scholar who
effort to achieve great marks and attempt to study away from home town or their comfort zones.
When the things are accessible unnecessarily, they never valued by anyone and worth it for
them. They just create complications, which bring challenge for student to actively listen and
understand real meaning of words. It is quite essential for them to find out solution regarding this
issue, in effective and appropriate manner.
Technical terms-
Effective listening is defined as ability of individual person that enabled them to gather
information about any subject or topic in which they are highly interested orally. Technical terms
or words are quite difficult to understand, hear and translate. As it may also consider as listening
challenge that students deal and face at the time of higher education. Technical terms are not
easy to comprehend and in order to do so a student may use internet (Bakshi and Kalidoss,
2020). It consumes a lot of time, which put negative impact on next practices of individual
listener as they may delay attending next session or completing daily academic work. It is not
easy to understand and convert into meaningful information that may utilize in the future,
especially during examination to answer question about topic which covers technical words.
Abbreviations-
An abbreviation refer to shortened type of written phase or word, which tutor may use
during their teaching session to teach many students. Sometimes word shortened is important,
but in case of higher education, it creates challenge for each student in term of listening and
understanding information provide by their tutors. It may impact negatively upon listening
ability of scholars and slow down the process of their better comprehending about a subject.
When individual may never hear a sentence earlier they are unable to understand its short form
and take time to do so for which varied tools and methods require. Short form of many sentences
may create issue to hear and then understand. It may lead to decrease listening efficiency and
provide unpleasant outcome.

2- Suggestion based on tactics that teachers can utilize to help students improve their
listening skills
In the world of education, there are several approaches and effective ways are accessible
that teachers used to obtain desire outcomes and support individual student to grow rapidly and
productively, which is important and beneficial for them.
Here, in the context of five listening challenges, useful strategies may discuss below that
tutors utilize to help their students for specific reason;
Strategy 1
In regard to challenge one that students faced while getting higher education and taking
part in each session related to their study, teacher can develop and adopt useful strategy such as
questioning. Instead of reading and explaining study material too fast in speed, they can take
initiative to ready a paragraph, then explain and ask question, which enable them to make assure
that all students are listening what they teach. It is so important for them to do so, because with
listening skills scholars may engage themselves regarding study activity in effective manner.
They may slow down their speed of lectures, which make students capable to understand and
listen. Speed of delivering sentences may affect listening efficiency of individual person, so its
important for speaker to deliver in understanding manner.
Strategy 2-
Just like above one, teachers can consider another way to improve their students listening
competencies. For example, instead of using long sentences, they may effort to prepare
themselves for lecture by reading a pre-lecture handout based on topic which they discuss within
class room where number of scholars are present. By conducting this activity, teachers may
break long sentences into short notes which they used to provide info about subject among
scholars. By breaking sentences, they may attempt to enable students regarding enhancing their
listening competence through which they understand academic information and may use in
effective manner during examination. Preplanning may always work in effective way as it
prepare a person about in the future challenges.
Strategy 3-
Teacher may attempt to develop listening skill of each student, by creating effective
strategy and conducting their activities accordingly. For example, use of meaningful and small
sentences or phrases may contribute to develop this competence, which provide a lot of

advantages to scholars as they may obtain better understanding about lectures based on particular
topic and convert practically to get high scores. With this strategy they can develop competence
and allow them to listen actively about varied concepts that has been discussed during their
higher education time. They may also utilize academic language instead of unnecessary words to
spell actual meaning of information written in educational books. It is one of the best tactics that
teacher may adopt.
Strategy 4-
Instead of using technical terms that negatively impact in the context of listening ability
of students, teachers may take beneficial action. For instance, they may talk less but meaningful
and provide information about main highlight of each chapter, which make listening easier and
simpler for students. Furthermore, in order to support scholars regarding improving their active
listening skill, teacher may take initiative to use simple and easy word by using synonym of
each, which made students capable to understand and save their time that invest in the context of
finding simple meaning of technical terms which create challenge for them to listen. They may
effectively utilize advance technologies to do so, through skill development process become
easier than ever.
Strategy 5-
Furthermore, tutor may adopt more techniques in term of strategy to achieve set aim and
support students to do so in effective way, through which they develop their understanding about
any topic or concept clearly and successfully. For example, they may provide listening task to
individual learner which enable them to determine weakness of their candidates regarding
listening and enable to develop effective plan that help to overcome that weak point which may
impact negatively upon growth and development of students. They may avoid usage of short
form because it may create issue to understand the data and actual meaning of entire chapter. It
may also create more challenges, which consume time and effort a lot.
CONCLUSION
On the basis of above discussion, it has been determined that teachers has overcome the
negative impact that students gets from varied listening challenges. By following key five
effective strategies they supported individual student in effective and productive manner.
Furthermore, from above analysis, it has been concluded that by overcoming the key barriers of
active listening, individuals has obtained the benefits of being a productive employee in the

future, for which listening play vital role. Along with this, above stated strategies has provided
more advantages. It has enabled individuals to be knowledgable, which is important for everyone
to have so.

REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Bakshi, S.S. and Kalidoss, V.K., 2020. A call to raise awareness on “Make Listening Safe”
initiative by WHO. The Egyptian Journal of Otolaryngology. 36(1). pp.1-2.
Baron, N.S. and Mangen, A., 2021. Doing the Reading: The Decline of Long Long-Form
Reading in Higher Education. Poetics Today. 42(2). pp.253-279.
Boesch, C., 2020. Listening to the appeal from the wild. Animal Behavior and Cognition. 7(2).
pp.257-263.
Jiang, Y. and Chun, D., 2021. Web-based intonation training helps improve ESL and EFL
Chinese students' oral speech. Computer Assisted Language Learning. pp.1-29.
Usmonova, K.B., 2020. CHALLENGES WITH TEACHING SPEAKING TO ESL STUDENTS
AND METHODS TO OVERCOME THE HURDLES. Science and Education. 1(8).
Online
Prepare English language students for academic listening. 2021. [Online]. Available Through:
<https://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/prepare-english-language-students-
academic-listening>