A Study On Listening Skills Among The Students At Higher Education Level

In the process of communication, listening is the ability where messages are to be received accurately and interpreted properly (Vaughn-Furlow, 2018). If there is no effective listening capability in someone, the messages are always misunderstood by them. As a result, the entire communication process is cut off and the sender of the messages also easily become frustrated or irritated. There are always two important things of listening regardless of the any language: first one is focus and other one is attention. The people, who could not comprehend the meaning while listening are the real poor listeners. Listening skills is such a skill that some people have to work harder to acheive it. At the time of listening, the most important thing is that he will be able to listen to a variety of voices at minimum time.

The present study has been conducted to measure the listening skills among 70 students from a University in West Bengal, India. The cross sectional survey method has been adopted for this present study and simple random sampling technique has been used for selecting the samples. A questionnaire developed by Dr. Muktipada Sinha (2017) has been used to collect primary data. The result revealed that the maximum number of students have shown high level of competencies in listening skills. It has also been observed that urban students have higher level of listening skills than the rural counterpart. Students from Science background have low level of Listening skills than students from Arts background. Therefore, the stream of study plays an important role in developing the listening skills. It has been also noticed that the students from English medium has performed a little better than the students from Bengali medium. These results are also statistically significant.