LISTENING SKILLS

Listening is an input and receptive skill, as reading is. That fact makes that both have similarities:

- To improve your listening, you should know that it is not essential to understand every word.  You are also a good listener if you achieve your objectives although you have not understood every single word.

- Predicting and anticipating are the basic strategies, which are very helpful to understand a listening exercise successfully.

- Strategies used in listening depend on the purpose, as well. It is not the same listening to general information, where more information can be over heard, as listening to specific information, as we do in the activities in class. 

Although reading and listening are quite similar, the main difference is that listening cannot be controlled because you cannot go back as in reading; so you only have an ephemera opportunity.

There are also some difficulties we should take into account, like puns, which are words that have more than one meaning. As a result, puns are difficult in a language. We find it in humour, for example. This is the reason why humour is so complicated in a foreign language because of our ignorance of the other meanings. 

 

Stress of words and accents is a point that also makes listening difficult because they are different from our language and we are not used to them. Furthermore, we have to be aware that there is not a perfect or a bad accent; every land has its own peculiarities. Differences do not make languages better or worse. I strongly believe that we have to be tolerant to other nationalities or speakers, considering that we want the others to be respectful with us.