Effective listening is an important communication ability. A 2015 survey found that listening was the most significant oral communication skill in the job, followed by presenting and chatting. Instructors who employ lectures in their courses have the potential to make subtle but important adjustments to lecture formats to assist students develop and practice their listening skills.
Why effective listening is challenging
Effective listening abilities, like other communication skills, require time and work to acquire. Effective listening demands active engagement on the part of the listener: the listener must pay full attention to the speaker, seek to understand the message being conveyed, and work to interpret the message’s significance. This active participation might be difficult on multiple fronts. Listeners are distracted by their surroundings (noise, visual, and other sensory aspects) as well as by themselves. During a university lecture, listeners may struggle to take notes and stay up with the presentation.
Furthermore, engaged listening is difficult to maintain over time. According to Youki Terada, kids may struggle to pay attention if the speaker speaks for too long. In a 2016 study, researchers found that elementary pupils struggled to focus for longer than 10 minutes. A 2011 study found that material delivered early in a lecture is more reliably kept than material presented later, although middle and high school pupils may have a somewhat longer retention period. Simply put, it is difficult to attentively listen during a whole speech.
Why effective listening is a skill worth teaching
Helping children improve and practice their listening skills offers various advantages for both students and teachers. Students, particularly those in their early university years, may have difficulty discriminating between critical material and instances, details, and other irrelevant information. Improving their listening skills helps them to make these distinctions. According to David Geelan, active listening promotes higher understanding and knowledge retention. It happens when students are paying close attention, anticipating what will come next, questioning the concepts offered, considering how these ideas connect with their prior knowledge and viewpoint, and reflecting on how to apply the new learning in their work and life.”
It gives instructors confidence that their students are actually learning. As many instructors have realized, just because your pupils appear interested does not imply that they grasp or absorb the crucial concepts. Louis Deslauriers is of the opinion that “a superstar lecturer can explain things in such a way as to make students feel like they are learning more than they actually are.” This can cause significant disappointment for both teachers and students when assignments and tests expose the mismatch.
How you can teach listening skills
Encouraged to incorporate active listening into your lecture-based classes? Here are a few suggestions to try.
1. Use explicit instructions: Inform students that you are arranging your lectures with ways to improve their listening abilities. Explain what good listening is and how your pedagogy aims to support it.
2. Provide a clear structure and signposts in your presentations: Clearly define the main thoughts and ideas. (Nothing helps students focus more than adding, “What I’m about to tell you is a key concept that you might see on the exam.” Distinguish between significant information and supporting examples.
3. Make the lecture slides available before class: Some teachers are hesitant to publish lecture slides for concern that it may reduce attendance. Research suggests that using slides to provide important ideas may boost class engagement by reducing the need for students to take hurried notes. Students can simply add their own notations. The availability of slides prior to or following the lecture makes a difference. Before is more beneficial to students, with higher attendance rates, whereas after reinforces student disengagement from class and decreases attendance.”
4. Pause your lesson every 10 minutes to ask an open-ended question: An open-ended question like “Which parts of what I just covered were less clear?” is likely to elicit more interest than “Are there any questions?” Better yet, halt every ten minutes or so and ask a question that encourages them to interact with the topic. Some of the examples are “What could be some of the implications/consequences of what I just covered?” and “Why might what I just covered be important?” In the words of Geelan, “Deep conceptual questions that require thinking and both engaging with and applying the ideas to novel contexts are much better than simple factual or recall questions.”
5. Every 10-15 minutes, engage in brief active learning tasks that focus on improving your listening abilitie:. According to Isis Artze-Vega, educators should hold students accountable for listening and provide compelling reasons to do so. Your active learning exercises can be quite brief, such as one- to two-minute quizzes on recently taught subject using in-class polling technology. They can also be longer, such as a three- to five-minute pause during which students write down what they just heard in the lecture.
6. Teach kids to listen for important concepts: At the beginning of a short lecture segment, inform students that after 10 minutes, they will work in small groups for five minutes to differentiate between what information was presented as the central idea and what information was presented as details (facts, examples, etc.) supporting or demonstrating the central idea. Before proceeding, we will debrief as a class.
