Develop You Listening Skills
Listening skills form an important part of effective communication skills. Often people do not recognize the importance of listening skills while taking about vocabulary. Vocabulary plays an important role in a person`s ability to converse, but many people lack listening skills because of which their effective communication skill set doesn`t get completed. For effective communication a person needs to have listening, reading, writing and speaking ability. Any compromise in these LSRW skills could seriously hamper his vocabulary and effective communication development ability. Many competitive exams such as GRE, IELTS, TOFFEL, etc tend to test a candidate based on his LSRW skills. These skills are inherent in nature for every human being the only effort he/she needs to place is in nurturing and developing them.
Old people tend to listen to others much more thoroughly than generation x. Listening skills cannot be nurtured overnight and they cannot be gained overnight. Listening skills are to be learnt in a phased manner. Some of the steps outlined here may sound funny but in reality they are much more powerful than any other conventional method.
Switch on the radio and listen to a news channel or songs from your favourite play station (radio). Try to listen to the radio for at least an hour without doing any other work. Many people tend to put on radio and then go back to work, this habit will not improve listening skills.
Listening to debates/parliamentary news/new channels on television will improve your listening skills. Make sure that you don’t perform any work during these listening practises. Concentrate about the topic or debate which is going and then at the end of the discussion put down or speak out your thoughts and feelings. Many at times people tend to ignore the fact that speaking in the midst of a debate is an acceptable fact which is not the case. Documentaries are interesting and make you think about the subject.
Many competitive exams such as IELTS, TOFFEL, GRE, etc have listening tests. Listening materials for these exams are available commercially. Try to practise materials for those tests. It gives you good insight into the requirements of listening skills. Most of these tests demand you to answer the questions based on what you have listened to. Listening materials are available on compact disks, online, etc.
Try to practise listening skills with your group of friends. When you are practising with a group there are fair chances of you getting distracted which is the situation in a real time. Make a slow and steady transition to real life scenarios which will give you the courage to stand up and demonstrate your effective communication skills.
