Be a good listener

by K.K.D. Premalal Matugama Sp. Corr

Do you listen to others? Do others listen to you? Whatever the response is, listening is an essential part of communication and it is totally different from hearing.

Hearing is merely the ability of the ear to sense sounds around one, but listening is more conscious effort to interpret the sounds, requiring concentration of the mind.

In brief, whatever words come on to your ears, it is involuntary, but listening means hearing with concentration.

It is voluntary. We hear different sounds and we tend to ignore them. We listen to people and we learn a lot.

Why do we think listening is important? We have two ears but only one mouth, probably because listening is twice as hard as talking. On the other hand, 'silent' and 'listen' are spelled with the same letters.

It shows that silence helps you to listen well. When we listen, we can learn a great deal.

We have the chance of improving our knowledge learning pronunciation of different words, enhancing oratorical skills, using the correct tone and accent and many more to add the list.

Language learning

As far as language learning is concerned, we pay attention to four skills namely, listening, speaking, reading and writing.

It is a positive sign that some institutes and teachers use listening exercises to improve the language of the pupils.

However, present day children pay scant attention for listening. Consequently, they find it difficult to understand what others say.

Those who pursue higher studies benefit immensely by listening to their lecturers. They make it a point to jot down notes while listening to the lecturers. This really has tow advantages.

The first is that they can remember what they take in for future references. The second advantage is note taking that forces them to listen.

If you are a good listener, you will be very popular among your peers and even strangers.

Nobody will like you if you do not listen to others. If you do not listen to your spouse you cannot lead a happy married life.

If children do not listen to their parents and elders, their future will be ruined. Rulers also should listen to the grievances of the common people.

Teachers and parents are not an exception to this and they should listen to their children when and where necessary.

Announcement

You can get the required information by listening to announcements and instructions. When you are at the railway station, you can get to know the arrival and departure times of trains.

Most of the private hospitals use the public address system to inform patients of the arrival of doctors. We also can spend our leisure by listening to music. Light music is played in some work - places to increase the productivity.

Distractions

The listener should not be distracted. The speaker's voice should be audible enough to reach the ears of the listener. If the speaker comes out with a garbled version of an event of a situation, the listener will be confused and he may not like to listen to it.

Some speakers are in the habit of using high flown language with bombastic words. For example, if a teacher says, "Touch your Olfactory organ", no child will understand it. A simple word like 'nose' can be use instead of the 'Olfactory organ'.It is evident that most of us do not like to listen to lengthy speeches unless they are interesting.

One day a politician was addressing a large gathering. There was a huge crowd listening to him. He was speaking nearly for one hour and the crowd began to leave one by one.

However, one man was listening to him attentively and the politician was very happy to see him.

He asked, You are still listening to my speech and you are the one and only man who has realised the depth of my speech.

The man took no time to respond to the politician. "I'm impatiently waiting to take the loudspeakers away."

There is a saying, "you hear what you want to hear" and "You see what you want to see".

Some do not like to listen to pro-government news. Instead they listen to anti-government news.

When you are ill or when you have a plethora of problems, you cannot listen to other people. On the other hand, you do not like to listen to people who do not practise what they preach.

Yawning

You can also notice people looking at the clock every time and some can be seen yawning. All these things occur when they are fed up with listening.

You cannot get the maximum benefit of listening if you have hearing defects.

However, modern technology has devised many hearing aids for people who have such defects.Are you not interested in listening? If not, it's high time to cultivate the habit of listening. Parents and teachers can play a major role in developing listening skills.

Present day children have access to many sources of knowledge such as the internet, books, newspapers and magazines. Even a child from the backwoods can listen to the radio or watch television to fine-tune their listening skills.

If you are a good listener, you always have to encourage the speakers.

The good listener will nod, smile and give auditory feed back such as "Mmhum", "Yeah", "I see" "That's really interesting" "Please continue" or I would like to hear more.

So, be a good listener and succeed in all your ventures.