Soft Skills 2 (KNC 201) Dr Anupam Sharma

Unit 1
Listening
Listening is the process of receiving, constructing meaning from , and responding to spoken and/or non verbal messages.

It is the most powerful form of acknowledgement and a way of saying to your customer, “You are important”. To hear
something with thoughtful attention is an essential management and leadership skill.

Listening vs. Hearing

Hearing – physical process, natural , passive.

Listening – physical and mental process, active, learned process, a skill. Listening is hard.

You must choose to participate in the process of LISTENING.

Fast Facts
We listen at 125-250 wpm, think at 1000-3000 wpm.

75% of the time we are distracted, preoccupied or forgetful.

20% of the time, we remember what we hear.

More than 35% of businesses think listening is a top skill for success.

Less than 2% of people have had formal education with listening

Active Listening Skills

• It requires the listener to hear the words and identify the feelings associated with the words.
• Pay attention to the tone of the words and the nonverbal cues of the speaker.
• Maintaining eye contact with the speaker, concentrating on the speaker’s words, making verbal responses, and
summarizing parts of what has been said when clarity is needed.
• Overall it is active participation in a conversation.
• As a listener you must actually hear and not assume what is said.
• Don’t interrupt the speaker to interject your own thoughts.
• Let speakers finish out their own sentences. We cannot learn anything from others if we try to do all the talking.

Types of Listening
Informative Listening : Where your aim is to concentrate on the message being given. This may be the content of a
lesson, directions, instructions, etc.
Appreciative listening : Where the listener gains pleasure/ satisfaction from listening to a certain type of music or
listening to a particular charismatic speakers or entertainers, etc.

Empathic listening : Where the listener tends to listen rather than talk. Their non-verbal behavior indicates that the
listener is attending to what is being said. The emphasis is on understanding the speaker’s feelings and being supportive and
patient.

Discriminative listening : Where the listener is able to identify and distinguish inferences or emotions through the
speaker’s change in voice tone, their use of pause, etc. Some people are extremely sensitive in this way, while others are
less able to pick up these subtle cues. Where the listener may recognize and pinpoint a specific engine fault, a familiar laugh
from a crowded theatre or their own child’s cry in a noisy playground. This ability may be affected by hearing impairment.

Critical listening : Where the listener may be trying to weigh up whether the speaker is credible, whether the message
being given is logical and whether they are being duped or manipulated by the speaker. This is the type of listening that we
may adopt when faced with an offer or sales pitch that requires a decision from us.

Art of Listening
There are three main blocks to listening that most people fall victim to:
A) Daydreaming and Failing to Listen
It’s very easy to lose focus when others are speaking if their tone of voice is dull or you’re not interested in
what they’re talking about and even when someone is speaking well, their words can trigger thoughts that set
your mind wandering.
If your related thought was useful, jot it down in a notebook and remind yourself to pick it up later.Don’t give
yourself a hard time for losing concentration – accept it and come back to listening again.

B) Judging What the Other Person is Saying

We filter so much of what people say through judgement and while this is something that happens naturally, it
gets in the way of good listening.Maybe a friend tells you about a mistake they made at work and you think to
yourself that you’d never have made the same one, then as they continue to speak, you filter what they're saying
with this judgement and other opinions about them.
Judgement often takes the form of expressions of necessity – you must, you have to, you should have – or
evaluations of whether something’s good or bad so learn to watch for these signs both in yourself and others.

C) Predicting What The Other Person is Saying

Another bad habit is trying to predict what the person you’re listening to is going to say before they’ve said it.
This is something we do all the time with people we know well, like our close friends and family.The problem
is that this blocks listening because we colour everything they say through our view of their previous words and
actions.

2) Don’t Rehearse What You’re Going to Say

We’re all familiar with the problem of trying to rehearse our own piece while someone else is speaking.You can
notice when others are doing it because they tend to increase their rate of non verbal mms and uh-huhs to try
and take over the conversation.
A) Notice how often you’re thinking about what to say next
The first is noticing, which I keep coming back to but that’s because it’s the most important part of the
process.To start with, simply notice how often you’re thinking about what to say when it’s your turn.If you do
this often enough, you’ll be able to massively improve the quality of the communication you have with others.

B) Reflect back to the person

During a conversation, use a reflecting phrase like “you said X” or you mentioned Y” to repeat your
interpretation of the other person's ideas.Not only does this help you to grasp what they’re saying, it also shows
them you’re listening, which will improve the quality of the conversation.
The biggest challenge here is not interrupting, which takes us onto the next point - getting comfortable with
pauses.

C) Get comfortable with pauses

Very often someone might pause while they’re talking but that doesn’t always mean they’ve finished.A big
reason we prepare answers while the other person is speaking is because we don’t feel comfortable dealing with
silence.We somehow think that this makes it awkward, when what it really does is give us the space to think
and respond properly to what they’ve said.We feel that we have to rush to keep the conversation going, yet
we’ve all experienced great conversations where there are plenty of pauses.In fact these are the types of
conversations where people are really listening to each other.

3) Actively engage with what you’re listening to

When others are speaking for extended periods, it can be hard to process everything they're saying.This is
something many of us struggle with a lot at meetings and conferences.
After all, how much of what gets said in these situations actually gets processed?
If people remember 10% of a message after 3 days, imagine how low it is when there's a lack of personal
interest and you'd rather be somewhere else.

A) Create interest and be prepared

The first thing is to try and cultivate some sort of interest in what’s being said.If you’re in a meeting, the
chances are you’re there for a reason, so remind yourself why it’s important that you listen. Even if it’s
irrelevant see it as a training exercise for your listening skills.
If you’re going to a conference, look up the speakers and choose the talks you want to go to, so that you’re more
likely to be interested in what’s being discussed.

B) Take Good Notes

To engage with what you’re listening to, you should take notes.Listening is a more difficult process than
reading because you can’t go back and review what the speaker has said once they’ve said it, unless the talk has
been recorded.Generally, anything that makes the process more active will increase the quality of your listening
and note taking is a great way of doing this.
Listen Up
Because of our ability to record sound and video, the premium on careful listening has fallen. A few centuries
ago, if you didn’t listen when someone was speaking, you lost the message.
Listening is an art we should all take the effort to improve because we spend so much time doing it.It’s the key
to building high quality relationships with others – both professionally and personally.

Definition of Pronunciation
Pronunciation is truly important in English speaking activity since it can highly influence the meaning
of utterances. If someone makes error in pronouncing some words in a sentence, it can disturb the
communication, even it can be one of the factors which can lead to the conversation breakdown.

Importance of Pronunciation

Perceived competence, many native speakers will think a second language english speaker has a
lowlevel of fluency if their pronunciation is incorrect. This can cost you a job, a relationship .

Your pronunciation mistakes may imped you from being understood and affect your results at school and in
bussiness. Thid pronunciation helps you acquire English faster.

Our ear is so important this process and focusing on clearly hearing and then speaking the sounds of English
leads to large gains in fluency later on. Such learners may avoidspeaking in English, and thus experience
social isolation, employment difficulties and limited opportunities for further study. We also often judge
people by the way the speak, and so learners with poor pronunciation may be judges as incompetent,
uneducated or lacking in knowledge, even though listeners are only reacting to their pronunciation

Difficulties in Learning Pronunciation

• First related to hearing. People have different hearing sensitivities and it may possibly cause
errors.

• Second difficulties are concerned with learning how to make foreign sounds with our own speech
organs.

• Third difficulties related to the problem of knowing and remembering, the sound distribution of which
sounds are right to speak on a word or sentence, and in what context the sound is spoken.

• Fourth related to certain aspects that sound is related to each other.

• Fifth is related to fluency, the ability to pronounce a whole series of sounds (groups of sounds)
easily and quickly.

• Sixth is related to the relationship between pronunciation and conventional spelling. The above errors
are the most common problems faced by the learner.

• Therefore, it is very important for someone who is learning English to understand more about the
difficult sounds in English so that he can correct those mistakes
Definition of Tongue Twister
Tongue twister is a sentence or phrase that is intended to be difficult to say, especially when repeated
quickly and often.

This activity is aimed to consolidate the Englishsounds students have learned by creating a game like
atmosphere for practice. It is wise to include tongue twister that highlight particularly problematic
minimal sound differences (e.g., pronunciation of /f/ and /v/; /s/ and /š/; /f/ and /θ/).

Many tongue twisters use a combination of alliteration and rhyme. They have two or three sequences of
sounds, then the samesequences of sounds with some sounds exchanged. For example, “She sells sea shells
on the sea shore. The shells that she sells are sea shells.

Types of Tongue Twister

There are some types of tongue twisters which can be used in the classroom. Those are as follows:
1)Sentence type
• Can you can a can as a canner can a can?
• Six sleek swans swam swiftly southwards.
• A big black bug bit a big black dog on his big black

2)Repetitive
• Sheena leads, Sheila needs
• World Wide Web
• Eleven benevolent elephants
• Babbling bumbling band of baboons
• Thirty-six thick silk threads
• Crash Quiche Course
3) Story
• When you write copy you have the right to copyright the copy you write. You can write good and
copyright but copyright doesn‟t mean copy good –it might not be right good copy, right?
• Now, writers of religious services write rite, andthus have the right to copyright the rite they
write. Conservatives write right copy, and have the right to copyright the right copy they write. A right
wing cleric might write right rite, and have the right to copyright the right rite he has the right
towrite. His editor has the job of making the right rite copy right before the copyright would be right.
Then it might be copy good copyright.
• Should Thom Wright decide to write, then Wright might write right rite, which Wright has a
right to copyright. Copying that rite would copy Wright’s right rite, and thus violate copyright, so
Wright would have the legal right to right the wrong. Right? Tongue twisters have various levels of
difficulty. So that, a teacher should select an appropriate type of tongue twister based on the age and
ability of his or her students

Stress in English Language

English is known as a stressed language. Stressed languages are languages spoken with differing degrees of
emphasis on the words and syllables in the sentences.

Word Stress Rules

There are two very simple rules about word stress:

One word has only one stress. (One word cannot have two stresses. If you hear two stresses, you hear two
words. Two stresses cannot be one word. It is true that there can be a "secondary" stress in some words. But a
secondary stress is much smaller than the main [primary] stress, and is only used in long words.)

We can only stress vowels, not consonants.

Here are some more, rather complicated, rules that can help you understand where to put the stress. But do not
rely on them too much, because there are many exceptions. It is better to try to "feel" the music of the language
and to add the stress naturally.

A. Stress on first syllable

rule examples

Most 2-syllable nouns PRESent

EXport
CHIna
TAble

Most 2-syllable adjectives PRESent

SLENder
CLEVer
HAPpy

B. Stress on last syllable

rule examples

Most 2-syllable verbs preSENT

exPORT
deCIDE
beGIN

There are many two-syllable words in English whose meaning and class change with a change in stress. The
word present, for example is a two-syllable word. If we stress the first syllable, it is a noun (gift) or an adjective
(opposite of absent). But if we stress the second syllable, it becomes a verb (to offer). More examples: the
words export, import, contract and object can all be nouns or verbs depending on whether the stress is on the
first or second syllable.

C. Stress on penultimate syllable (penultimate = second from end)

rule examples

Words ending in -ic GRAPHic

geoGRAPHic
geoLOGic

Words ending in -sion and -tion teleVIsion

reveLAtion

For a few words, native English speakers don't always "agree" on where to put the stress. For example, some
people say teleVIsion and others say TELevision. Another example is: CONtroversy and conTROversy.

D. Stress on ante-penultimate syllable (ante-penultimate = third from end)

rule examples

Words ending in -cy, -ty, -phy and -gy deMOcracy

dependaBIlity
phoTOgraphy
geOLogy

Words ending in -al CRItical

geoLOGical

E. Compound words (words with two parts)

rule examples

For compound nouns, the stress is on the first part BLACKbird

GREENhouse

For compound adjectives, the stress is on the second part bad-TEMpered

old-FASHioned
rule examples

For compound verbs, the stress is on the second part underSTAND

overFLOW
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