The importance of active listening in communication and second language acquisition. Steps to improve active listening skills to reach effective and successful interpersonal interactions

• 1.1.    Displaying involvement in what the person is saying; paying attention;

• 1.2.    Carefully observing the person speaking;

• 1.3.    Resisting distractions;

• 1.4.    Trying to stay focused on what is being said;

• 1.5.    Asking for clarification of anything that we do not fully understand; sharing your views ;

• 1.6.    Delaying or withholding judgements.

• 2.    THE IMPORTANCE OF ACTIVE LISTENING IN COMMUNICATION.

• 3.    THE IMPORTANCE OF ACTIVE LISTENING IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

• 4.    THE STEPS TO IMPROVE ACTIVE LISTENING

As it can be seen from above, in this type of listening, one is fully engaged with the other person talking in a positive way by paying close attention, paraphrasing, reflecting, delaying judgements, and clarifying. Therefore, implementing it in our daily conversations and foreign language teaching and learning can facilitate more intensive and effective atmosphere.

Learning to actively listen to other people is the most crucial skill one can have. How well one can listen has a great influence on his job, career, and the quality of his relationships with others. In that, communication is an integral part of our everyday lives and is at the heart of everything we do each day, active listening encircles the most of communication: feeling and perceiving the other person and make them feel heard and valued can make the best of an effective communication. It has the potential to resolve or create conflicts; cementing or ruining relationships; or create misunderstandings if not used accordingly. Without actually having a listen to what is being said, it is difficult to logically give relevant or appropriate responses or make sense in our reactions. As a communication technique, in many professional areas listening is of utmost importance. A one-to-one tutor, manager, therapist, entrepreneur, social worker, and many more need to know how to actively listen as a part of their job. Not only does listening help them to set their work properly, but also, it brings many benefits in their personal interactions with others. As young couples or parents, men and women can prevent misunderstandings and conflicts that may arise between them through listening one another carefully. It has been suggested that active listening helps to overcome conversational narcissism, the act of putting ourselves first in a conversation. American author Tom Shachtman describes conversational narcissism as a part of individualism in which the word ‘’I’’ is used more often. It is natural that during conversation, individuals shift responses to themselves instead of listening to what the other person has to say. Such communicational barriers can be dealt with using active listening. Good communication skills often go far beyond speaking and listening. These skills also require understand and feel the emotions, body language, thoughts and other non-verbal behavioral acts, so that communicators have mutual understanding and feeling. Active listening means more than just listening, it also means our ability to wait and withhold judgments and not jumping to conclusions or solutions, or more often, being defensive.

Learning a language is a complex process in which both teachers and students need to put a lot of work in. Traditionally, when teaching a language, teachers focus more on developing learners’ verbal skills, specifically, speaking skills. But, non-verbal communication skills such as listening, is also a n important part of a learning process and serve as a bridge to other skills and sub-skills that stem from it. Unlike hearing, active listening includes understanding, involvement and thinking. Here, both teachers and learners have the purpose of what listening content would include. As a receptive skill, listening directly enhances other productive skills such as speaking and writing. In order to be able to effectively speak in another language, learners should start from listening. Take for example, babies learning to talk. It has been found that the babies build their foundation of listening when they are still in their mother’s womb. At that period, babies learn to differentiate sounds and later, they develop the ability to respond to utterances and spoken words. As a result, newborns start to learn a language: in this case, it is a spoken language and all the elements that spoken language would include. Pronunciation, accent, intonation, stress and pitch are acquired easily from the very young age as the studies suggest. Introducing listening, specifically active listening prior to language learning, helps to form the idea of what the language may sound or heard. In other words, prior listening precedes recognition of the language: vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, sentence structure and other characteristics before they are able to speak. The situation is the same with language learners. If they are introduced with audio content of a language, the chances of developing an understanding of a language is higher. Here, understanding and comprehension play an important role in manifesting speaking response. Without proper understanding, learners would find themselves lost during conversations. Since listening comprehension includes understanding and giving response to the statement, active listening should be seen as a top priority in developing language skills and sub skills. Moreover, a good listener is also a good speaker. In order to be able to fluently speak, learners should first have a good grasp of understanding the spoken content. However, problem arises when the learners have difficulty in making out different sounds, accents, pronunciation characteristics, dialects or other aspects of spoken interaction. It may sound challenging for language learners to actively listen something when compared to native speakers. However, with proper practice of active listening, these communication barriers can be overcome. Through active listening process, most cultural barriers within one’s mother tongue and learning language are lost and thus, many costly errors and nuances are avoided. Also , the contribution of AL in language learning is the process of information in the brain that is obtained through spoken communication. There, synthesis and analysis of processed information takes place and the brain processes the data, forms notions and makes responses. Therefore, it is commonly acknowledged that when we are learning a language, we gain 45% of language competence from listening, 30% from speaking, 15% from reading and 10% from writing . This means that, listening is the first skill that we gain most information about the language from. Teachers are now using more listening exercises during the class to help students get more involved in spoken language. As a matter of fact, the importance of active listening in language competency is now widely being understood. Teachers are also teaching to differentiate between passive hearing and active listening in their classes as many students who have achieved a certain level of language competence have a good ground in understanding the spoken context.

Active listening can be challenging for most people to develop. There are some reasons as to why both native and non-native speakers find listening difficult. There are some obvious reasons for this. First, we may have our own notions or responses about how things should be going. Second, we may have hard time in separating our feelings from others. Third, we may be waiting for the speaker to finish his response for any reason or so forth. However, applying some suggested methods and ways in our communication with others can actually make us an effective active listener. According to the article published in ‘’ Forbes’’ by Dianne Schilling, a few guidelines can make difference in our AL for better.

Give focused attention but be relaxed. Here we should block outer and inner distraction and pay undivided attention to listening content. Also, inner thinking and dialogue should be switched off so that we completely focus on what we are hearing.

Maintain an eye contact and face the speaker. Direct eye contact shows our intention to listening. Keeping an eye contact also means that we are willing to be open minded and interested in talk what the other person is talking about. It does not win and instant or intense eye contact but a reasonable one.

Watch body language . Being aware of our body posture, the non-verbal cues such as nodding, leaning slightly forward can create a warm atmosphere to welcome spoken interaction. Besides, it lets the speaker feel valued and heard.

Allow silence . It is very essential that we learn to keep calm when necessary and not to disturb them with our own statement. A pause allows the speaker to gather his thoughts, and interruption would make the speech conveyed with a lot of errors

Reflect. Here, we are not asked to exactly repeat what we may have heard but it is about paraphrasing and reflecting back. We repeatedly ask ourselves questions and repeat what have been just said in order not to forget the statement

Ask clarifying questions . The aim here is to make sure that we understand what we are listening. We can ask confirming questions that require short answers such as, yes or no answers. Or else, we can also ask the following questions:

‘’what you are saying is…’’, ‘’If I get you right…’’, ‘’what I understand is...’’ and so forth.

Defer judgments and keep an open-mind. That involves delaying judgments, assumptions or inferences until the speaker is done speaking. It is important to wait for what he or she has to say before formulating ideas because these prior judgments may distort valuable information.

Additionally, we can suggest that echoing or shadowing, in other words, repeating what the speaker said inside or outside help us not to forget the important piece of information. For example, repeating telephone numbers after they have just been provided by the person we are talking to, assists us not to get that numbers wrong, not to make mistakes with other numbers or not to forget what has just been said. Similarly, trying to ‘’picture’’ what the speaker is describing aids us to get the proper idea of exactly what the topic is revolving around. If the speaker is giving directions on how to get to the city center, or talking about the process of making, for example, bread, the listener’s attempts to picture those directions to the city center and steps to make a bread would help him to understand better as he is drawing ways to get somewhere or making guidelines how to do something. Moreover, the act of putting ourselves in the speaker’s shoes and try to feel what he is feeling and wants to convey, would make us an effective and active listener. As we mentioned above, in doctor-patient relationship, feeling the emotions of clients and approach them accordingly can really make difference in curing and treating process. Carl Rogers and Richard Farson suggest that ’’being an active listener makes us better person’’. Here, they emphasize the benefits of AL in our relationships with others and in our lives and careers. In the field of education and second language acquisition, many educators suggest exercises to practice Al for gaining improvement. One of such methods is called ‘’micro listening’’, that is, listening to short excerpt from a particular listening content and developing comprehension related to it. The term ‘’micro listening’’ is new in linguistics but gained much popularity among teachers and students in second language acquisition. Micro listening has been found more effective since unlike ‘’macro listening’’, the content here is short, easy to grab, interesting and does not require long attention span from the listener. Apart from that, micro listening develops listener’s focus as the content is short and probably, fast, listener tries to get as much as possible from what he is hearing and therefore, gives undivided attention to it. Here, the role of application and implementation of different listening exercises would help listeners to become active listeners.

As it stated above, AL in communication was mainly worked out by Rogers and Farson and has been a benchmark for effective communication. Similarly, its role in second language acquisition has developed linguistics to a great extent in terms of comprehension and making response. Again, listening is closely interconnected with other skills and sub skills that are needed to develop language comprehension and fluency. Specifically, AL, or active listening has a great part in language cognition,that is, being able to comprehend, understand,analyze, make inferences, compare and contrast, generalise or specify, classify or make associations, formulize, reason what they have learned in the target language. Therefore, it is essential for every communicator and language learner need to develop active listening strategies to reach smooth and meaningful conversations or gain fluency and understanding.

To conclude, the purpose of the paper was to review some of the basic concepts related to the definition of active listening, its importance in communication and second language acquisition and give suggestions from the studies of authors and writer's own observations to break through some of the challenges in developing AL in our interactions with others and in education. In the final lines, it is good to take a look at the following quote by Laurie Buchanan [6] "when we invest in active listening, the dividend is an expended capacity for compassion " to finish all the aforementioned views about the steps to strengthen our active listening skills.

REFERERCES

• 1.    Dianne Shchilling, "10 Steps to effective listening " , Forbes, online article, November 9, 2012.

• 2.    Steven Brown, "Teaching Listening ", Cambridge University Press, 2006.

• 3.    Carl Rogers & Richard Farson, "Active listening "  excerpt from " Communication in business today'' , 1957, Chicago Industrial Relations Center (25 pp.) Also in Newman, R. G/ Danziger , M. A / Cohen, M (eds.), Communication in business today, Washington C.C. (Health and Company ) 1987.

• 4.    Selin Yildrim, Ozgur Yildirim, " The importance of listening and listening omprehensionproblems experienced by language learners: A literature review ", Abant Izzet Baysul Űniversitesi Eģitim Fakultesi Dergesi, November 17, 2016.

• 5.    Tom Shchatman, "The inarticulate society: eloquence and culture in America", New York: Free Press, 1995.

• 6.    Jahromi VKm et al. "Active listening :The key of successful communication in hospital managers" , Electron Physician, Iran, Kerman, 2016.

• 7.    Dr. Azize Ergeneli, Active listening instructor " ppt , Sunum Tarihi, March 14, 2007.

• 8.    Laurie Buchanan, "The art of listening ", Tuesday's with Laura , online article, April 27, 2015.

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