Importance Of Listening Skills

2.3. Listening Skill: Significance, Purpose, and Components
Listening ability is a main and crucial part of one’s language ability while some ELT methods have assumed that listening skill will develop automatically during enough exposure to the language and via the practice of vocabulary and pronunciation (Hedge, 2000). Vandergrift (1999) also defines listening as an indispensable resource of acquisition that makes the crucial difference between the more or less competent and successful ELF learners. People tend to believe that L2 learners need an enough amount of comprehensible aural input to help them to acquire a particular language (Rost, 1994), although we are not sure about type and quantity of the aural input (Rost, 1990).
Foreign language listening comprehension is a complex process and has a crucial role in developing foreign language competence. In the past, listening comprehension in language learning was overlooked but at present some researchers have devoted some time to listening and they believe that it is an important skill in teaching and learning a second or foreign language. For instance, Nunan (1998) believes that listening is the basic skill in language learning. Without listening skill, learners will never learn to communicate effectively. In fact over 50% of the time that students spend functioning in a foreign language should be devoted to listening (Nunan, 1998).
Listening is an active process that entails construction of meaning beyond simple decoding. The activation of what is known about the world clearly assists processing the aural and perceptual codes (Hayati, 2009). Therefore, having a high ability in listening comprehension skill has always been one of the main concerns of not only E...

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...ion and presented aural texts without visual or verbal/textual supportive information. Students were often frustrated by such activities (Vogely, 1998) for any number of reasons including lack of prior knowledge of the topic, the comprehensibility of the speaker, the materials reviewed, the lack of visual information, or even the technological design employed. Certainly, when we utilize technology-based listening comprehension materials, our ultimate goal is to help students develop their language skills. However, if the technological design does not offer helpful comprehension aids (e.g., visual aids), then many students’ preferences or needs are ignored, potentially leading to poor comprehension. Thus, when students struggle with the material or the technology used, we find that “the more they fail, and the less effort they come to invest.” (Salomon, 1983, p. 43).