Study Skills for Higher Education: Improving Listening Abilities

This essay examines the listening challenges encountered by students in higher education and proposes strategies that teachers can implement to enhance their students' listening skills. The essay identifies distractions, language barriers, auditory processing disorders, unfamiliar vocabulary, and the length and speed of speech as key obstacles to effective listening. It further suggests strategies such as knowing students personally, utilizing technology, encouraging active listening through increased student talk time, assigning specific listening tasks, and providing a clear purpose for listening. The essay concludes that addressing these challenges and implementing these strategies can significantly improve students' listening abilities and overall learning experience. Desklib provides access to similar essays and study resources.

Study Skills for Higher
Education
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3

MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................3
Five listening challenges............................................................................................................3
Five strategies teachers can use to help students improve their listening skills..........................5
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................6
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................7

INTRODUCTION
Listening is a process of receiving, explaining and responding the spoken and unspoken
messages in a communication process. It is an important factor for an effective communication.
Listening helps in building relations, solving conflicts, ensure understanding and improve
accuracy. Listening is a major part of learning. Listening motivates students to learn more about
the world. A capable listener is able to understand the accent, vocabulary and pronunciation of a
speaker. (Ismayilova, 2019). Listening challenges faced by students has been discussed in this
report and the strategies a teacher can use to help help them in improving this skill.
MAIN BODY
Five listening challenges
Listening is an important integral part of effective communication. Listening gives a
learner informations about the current events of the world and knowledge about the different
culture and practices that make them connected with the world outside the classroom and school.
Listening is always a challenge for the students as there are many things that can became a
barrier for them and pull their attention away from the conversation. (Larasati, 2018). The
following are some of the listening challenges the students might face.
Distractions
The major reason the students face while listening is distraction from outer sources. They
might get distracted from unnecessary talking during the class when the class needs to be quite
and it distracts the students from what they were doing and takes away the focus of students from
listening to the speaker. The class activities, tardiness, eating food and background noises during
the class might distracts the students from listening. Student's personal devices like cell phones,
laptops and gadgets are some of the biggest classroom distractions for the students as well as for
the teachers. The attention of the speakers might get away from what they were saying and this
will lose the focus of students from listening.
Language challenges
Another challenge the students face is language challenge. Many of the students struggle
to learn new language or they do not have adequate time to learn new language and fails to
understand the speaker. (Listiyanto, 2021). For instance, if a student understands English
language only and takes admission in a Hindi language class, he will face difficulty in

understanding the language. If the students are not familiar with the cultural knowledge of
language than it will impact the understanding of a listener. This is the responsibility of a speaker
to make sure the students understands the background knowledge of language for an effective
communication.
Auditory Processing Disorder
It is a disorder when a listener is unable to hear small sound differences, it means the
brain fails to hear sounds in the usual way. People with APD might not recognize the differences
between some words like cat, bat, seventy and seventeen. This disorder can have an impact on
listening skills and interactions skills of a listener. (Liu and Jin, 2017). Students having this
disorder can use electronic devices like frequency modulation system to listen to the speaker
more clearly or teachers can provide them speech therapy sessions that can help them in
recognise sounds and improve conversational skills.
Unfamiliar vocabulary
Students finds it easy to listen and understand when the speaker's vocabulary contains
known words. It motivates the students to listen more to the speaker and have a positive impact
on the listening comprehension ability of the student. A lot of words have different meaning and
if they are not used in appropriate context by the speaker then the students will get confused.
Learning new words is a gradual and long process for a student. (Rahmadani, 2018).The speaker
must explain the meaning of the words that is new or unknown to the listener.
Length and Speed
Mostly students feel that everything a speaker is saying is important and this leads to
ineffective understanding, fatigue and failure of proper listening. The lot of information by the
speaker overloads the students and it discourages them. (Schupak, 2019). So, students need to
practice selective ignoring of heard information and must understand the main message behind
the information given by a speaker. Speaker must also encourage students to relax and listen
carefully and try to pick out essential information and ignore the rest. Speed also have a major
impact on the listening ability of a student. If the speaker is speaking too fast then this might
cause problem for students to understand each and every word of the speaker. Student might say
speaker to repeat again but in a recorded section it is difficult to repeat. Listener is unable to
control the speed of a speaker and this might create critical problems with listening

comprehension. Speakers need to control the speed of what they are saying in order to make the
listeners understand about the given information.
Five strategies teachers can use to help students improve their listening skills
In today's world of technology, it's hard for teachers to get the attention of students and to
engage them in active listening while teaching. The students get distracted from the surrounding
environment and doesn't pay attention to the teacher. (Voogd, 2020) It is difficult for a teacher to
grab the attention of the students towards what they are saying. Many teachers have to repeat
themselves to ensure that students not only listen to them but also understand what they are
saying. The teachers can use the following strategies to help students listen today.
Know your students
Students listen to a teacher who takes interest to know them in comparison to those who
have not. They feel connected with someone whom they know on personal level. Teachers must
take time to know their students, their hobbies, background, friends, interests and everything that
they want to share. A teacher can play games like get to know you with the students in the
beginning of the year or having them fill out questionnaires related to them.
Utilize Technology
With education getting technological friendly, a teacher can use various apps or select a
movie, documentary that will increase the attention level of students and they will listen to the
teacher carefully. There are different apps available for online teaching that will help in
improving the listening skills of students. (Wang, 2018) Companies are producing learning soft
wares, technological tools such as MP3/4 players and websites such as YouTube that helps in
improving listening skills in an individual.
Listen more and talk less
A teacher must provide more opportunities to the students to speak more and listen them
more so that when a teacher speaks the students might pay more attention and listen to the
teacher. Active listening plays an important part in developing the listening skills of students. A
teacher can increase the amount of time where students can talk more within their group and
decrease the amount of time where a teacher is speaking. This will increase the engagement of
students in listening to their teacher. A teacher can give students a group activity where students
have to speak about the given topic or about anything they are interested in. This will increase
the confidence of students as well as their engagement in the activities.

Give students a listening task
To encourage active listening another strategy is giving students a listening task. A
teacher can do a activity like pairing up the students and tell them to listen carefully what a
teacher is saying and then tell it to their partners. This will maximize the attention of the
students towards listening. (Zarei and Parhizkari, 2017). Each day give students a few time to
compare their notes or talk about anything related to the class that they want to clarify. A speaker
can also give students instructions tasks like listen and draw where a listener needs to draw
whatever a speaker is saying this activity will increase the concentration level and listening skills
of a student.
Listen for a Purpose
To make students more engaged in listening a teacher must provide a purpose whether it's
for reading or writing. (Ismayilova, 2019) A teacher can ask students to read the headings of the
chapters from their textbooks and write down the questions they had related to it. While
teaching a class a teacher can take a pause and ask students to write down questions about what
they had just heard from the teacher. This strategy will give students a purpose to listen more
attentively. A speaker can give tasks like find a ball from a secret location. Give students clues
from the starting point and direct them towards it. Activity like this will motivate a listener to
listen to the speaker and will increase the listening skills. These activities encourages students to
participate more in the class and they listen to more to their teacher.
CONCLUSION
Listening is an important part of an effective conversation. Listening is a complex
process for students to acquire. Most of the students lack listening skills, motivation and memory
retention. Teacher must use listening strategies to increase the listening skills of students.
Listening activities should be arranged for the students to encourage them to listen carefully to
the speaker. The listening challenges faced by students can be a result from visual and auditory
distractions, physical discomfort, lack of interest, stress, accent of speaker and many more. A
speaker must understand the need of a listener and act according to it. (Liu and Jin, 2017) .

REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Ismayilova, Y.M., 2019. Joint listening as a way of increasing perception in teaching a foreign
language. Международный журнал гуманитарных и естественных наук, (1-1).
Larasati, N.A., 2018, April. Video Blog as Authentic Materials: Enhancing Student’s Listening
Comprehension. In PROCEEDING CONFERENCE (p. 277).
Listiyanto, F.C., 2021. The Use of Song in Teaching Listening: An Interview Study to EFL
Learners of Junior High School in Banjarmasin (Doctoral dissertation, Universitas Islam
Kalimantan MAB).
Liu, Y. and Jin, Y., 2017. A Study of New Solutions On English Listening Obstacles.
Rahmadani, H., 2018. THE EFFECT OF VIDEO BLOG TOWARDS STUDENTS'LISTENING
COMPREHENSION SKILL. THE EFFECT OF VIDEO BLOG TOWARDS
STUDENTS'LISTENING COMPREHENSION SKILL.
Schupak, E.B., 2019. Listening Rhetoric in the Diverse Classroom: Suggestions for Praxis.
College Teaching. 67(3). pp.196-204.
Voogd, M.E., 2020. Effectively Measuring Dutch EFL Students’ Listening Comprehension
Proficiency: A Systematic Review (Master's thesis).
Wang, L., 2018. Research on College English Teaching Reform that Highlights Listening and
Speaking Skills.
Zarei, A.A. and Parhizkari, P., 2017. The relationship between media literacy and listening
comprehension among Iranian intermediate EFL learners. Bulletin de la Société Royale
des Sciences de Liège. 86. pp.891-907.