How To Develop Listening Skills In Students?
Do you know what keeps many students from unlocking their full potential? It’s the lack of active listening skills. Students who struggle to listen actively and keep information often perform poorly in academics. Poor listening skills also influence their social interactions and future success. They miss out on essential details during lectures and group project discussions, fail to understand conversations during social interactions, etc. Also, hampering their growth in both their personal and professional life. It is because listening skills are said to hold so much significance for students. If you’re wondering how to develop listening skills in students, we have the perfect solution here!
After researching the subject extensively, we’ve explored five effective strategies. These strategies can significantly improve students’ listening skills. These are practical and easy to implement. We have applied most of these strategies with our students and witnessed a massive improvement in their listening skills. So let’s quickly explore the strategies that can get you visible results.
How to Develop Listening Skills in Students?
There’s no exaggeration in saying that all successful people are active listeners. That’s because a lot of their success owes to their ability to precisely understand and comprehend the information they hear. It is the exact skill every child must develop. To prevent students from getting distracted and losing interest during classroom lectures, our teachers use the following strategies:
- Encouraging Active Listening
There are primarily two types of listeners: one is active and the other is passive. Active listeners attentively hear the process and retain the information. While on the other hand, passive listeners only hear but fail to retain the information. Being a passive listener, as we call it, does not aid students to comprehend their classes. They don’t keep anything they are taught. Hence, it’s crucial to encourage students to switch to active listening. You can do that by continuously cross-questioning the students while teaching them. Keep asking them questions so they remain active throughout. This is a simple technique that works great on students of all age groups.
2. Modelling Good Listening
An infrequently used method is to demonstrate the behaviour or action you’d like the observer to adopt. We are all aware that kids are great at imitation. They imitate the actions of those around them. So if you want children to pay attention to what you’re saying, you will also have to follow the same with them. When students start noticing their teachers actively listening to their doubts and queries, they reciprocate this action.
Besides just hearing students’ questions, you can show that you are listening through eye contact, nodding, and responding with body language. In addition, make sure to maintain a moderate pace while speaking to students so that they can properly comprehend, process, and understand your words.
3. Using Visual Aids
We have seen that a lot of kids better process information using visual aids than mere words. It is where visual aids, like pictures, graphs, charts, videos, infographics, etc., come into the picture.
When a classroom has students with different learning needs, the teaching approach must change. It is precisely what our teachers do. To ensure every student actively listens, understands, and retains information, you must use both visual and non-visual aids to deliver lectures. As a result, everyone in the class will respond better.
Leverage Technology for Honing Active Listening Skills
For all those wondering how to develop listening skills in students must use this effective strategy. Because today’s youth are tech-savvy, using tech-driven solutions can immediately attract their attention and make them engaged listeners. Utilizing technological resources like audiobooks, podcasts, and interactive videos are advised for the teachers here to further explain the concepts. These are mainly employed to enhance the regular classroom teaching materials.
More sophisticated tools and applications are employed to give students feedback on their enunciation and intonation, helping them to grow overall. When students hear and see content around a topic, they learn faster. Technology can help improve one’s listening abilities, so why not give it a go? In order for learning to be effective, active listening must be present in the classroom. This holds for workplaces and other facets of life as well.
Listening actively is a skill that is fading away with the rise of digital devices and their distracting tendencies, thus impacting students’ learning skills. The only means of avoiding this effect is to make them better listeners.
