Article Review

Teaching Listening Skills: Ready to Listen, Ready to Learn

By Monica Brady-Myerov

The article that I found on Edudemic.com discusses the importance of being a strong listener. It lists a few suggestions for teaching our students to hone their listening skills. As a teacher of first graders, I can attest to the fact that my students who I would deem as “good listeners” tend to also be the ones who offer thought-provoking questions and comments to a class discussion.

Brady-Myerov suggests that we can improve listening by focusing on some metacognitive strategies. She references one research study that examines how a listener uses cognitive listening strategies to make sense of what they are hearing and metacognitive listening strategies to monitor the process of listening. Metacognitive strategies place an emphasis on the listener actively engaging in the process of hearing and understanding. Some questions one might ask him or herself might be: Am I still listening? How do I get back on track? How do I understand that word?

Another suggestion for becoming a stronger listener is through orally telling stories. For students, both listening to stories from the teacher or their peers AND telling stories to the teacher or their peers can improve their listening. A study called “Learning to Talk and Listen” by the National Institute for Literacy shows that from a very early age “sharing stories helps children build oral language in a variety of ways—developing children’s speaking and listening skills, introducing new concepts or information, and increasing both vocabulary and the ability to define and explain the meanings of new words.”

A third and final strategy for boosting listening skills is through the use of pairing the written word with the audio/oral sound. The article references a study that looked at the effectiveness of watching TV programs with the same-language subtitles. The study found that if you add same language subtitling to the listening experience or to a video, literacy and language acquisition improve. Any time a teacher can incorporate the written words with the listening experience, this will help the student better understand the content.

The ability to be a good listener is a skill that most people will need to use on a daily basis throughout their lives. It is my belief that teachers of young, primary grade students should really emphasize how to be a strong listener while silent reading is not yet a mastered skill.