There are three main views about listening and in this post I'd like to briefly talk about them. Understanding these views about listening is crucial for teachers of English in understanding the nature of listening before teaching it.

The three views of listening are:

1. Listening as a skill
2. Listening as a product and
3. Listening as a process.

Let us look at each of them one by one.

Listening as a skill

This view of listening does not take into consideration the general characteristics of 'skill' like:

• Skills need time to develop
• Skills need practice
• Skills can be learned
• Skills develop over a period of time
• Skills are to be constantly monitored or evaluated in order to be sharpened

Instead, the listening as a skill perspective takes into account only the purpose of listening and identifies five different types of listening.

In addition to this listening as a skill identifies the key listening comprehension skills as:

• Listening for details
• Listening for gist
• Listening for specific information
• Drawing inferences and
• Making predictions.

(I'll post details about these in another blog post). Now let's look at the other two views on listening.

Listening as a product

This view of listening is concerned with the outcome of listening and ignores everything else. As a result the thrust in this view goes to what students come up with after listening rather than how they've arrived there. For testing listening, this view of it as a product is largely used.

Listening as a process

From a teaching listening perspective this view of listening is very relevant and  important. Here listening is treated as a mental process and an attempt is made to unravel the process of listening. When a listener listens the comprehension happens with the support of a number of cognitive systems - perception, memory, attention etc.

Firstly, the incoming stream of sounds is identified as words. Then the semantic and syntactic connections are thought of and the input is then related to the information stored in the long term memory before a final interpretation is reached.

There are, of course, a number of other variables too at play here that aid as well as inhibit comprehension like motivation, interest, attentiveness, short term memory, fatigue, vocabulary, etc.

In addition to the above three views considerable research has also happened about the usefulness of teaching listening strategies.