On Developing College English Students' Microskills Of Listening

AbstractListening comprehension has long been labelled as a passive skill. The teaching of listening is often characterized by playing the tape and checking answers with students. Listeners are demotivated and reduced to passive sound receivers. This paper argues that listening is not a passive act. Instead, it is a highly active participatory experience. It analyzes the obstacles to college students in English listening comprehension and points out that teachers should encourage active participation by listeners. Teachers should instruct students to develop various microskills such as recognizing stressed words to focus on new information, listening selectively to identifying important details, listening predictively to disambiguate reduced reduced forms, etc. By doing so, college students will become active listeners instead of passive sound receivers.