The forgotten language arts of listening and speaking

If you asked a dolphin about water, intelligent as it is, it would likely ask, ‘What is water?’ The dolphin, surrounded by it, does not identify water as a separate thing, nor does it understand its importance. This is how it is with two forgotten language arts: listening and speaking. They are so firmly interwoven in so many facets of our lives that we seldom think about them. We take them for granted. It’s time to alter that and put listening and speaking at the forefront of the minds of teachers, to actively impart to students these abilities, because they underpin so much of human interaction.

What must our graduates be able to perform successfully, regardless of their field? I would suggest that the answer is: to communicate effectively. What exactly does communicating in the workplace entail? As adults on the job, we devote three-quarters of our time to listening and speaking. That is sufficient rationale for focused efforts to train students to master these forgotten arts. I prefer using the phrase ‘listening and speaking’ rather than the more common ‘speaking and listening’ in the discussion of standards. I am turning the words around to emphasise that listening is the most important language art in life and education.

How do children learn? What was their first introduction to language? Listening. We all listened before speaking, and especially before reading or writing. Even our most visual and tactile students began their learning experiences by listening. I might add that reading among students is clearly declining. Books and libraries are passé. As the information explosion progresses uninterrupted, they will absorb a massive amount of information through listening to their teachers, of course, but also to one another, and speech supplied via various electronic means. If students’ major mode of knowledge acquisition is listening, it makes sense for them to pay close attention to what they’re hearing. In the classroom, it’s most likely to be spoken language – lectures, certainly, but also process explanations, project instructions, one-on-one conversations, presentations by classmates, and group discussions. Education is fundamentally and unquestionably grounded in oral communication.

Students will enter an increasingly commercial world, where linguistic fluency and sociability will be two essential conditions of success. To sit at your computer, exhilarated at a brilliant regression analysis, will not suffice if you are afraid to confidently present the results to your senior management. Students as citizens will also graduate into civic duties. Teaching them the importance of civic duty is a challenge because what they see happening around them is often uncivil. Teaching public policy inevitably leads to conversations about polarising issues: gender, caste, religion, and climate change, for instance. It is difficult to identify models for debates that are civil and constructive on these topics. What we see on television and social media is less discussion and more polemics, which make for wonderful theatre and draw young people, but do little to lead them towards a better understanding. This trend must be reversed at some place; that place should be our classrooms, where you teach listening and speaking skills to separate facts from assumptions, construct fair counterarguments, and reach evidence-based judgements.

How might we teach listening and speaking to young students? A good beginning is to teach the rhetorical relationship: speakers to listeners, listeners to subjects, and speakers to subjects. Successful teachers use what Aristotle called the Appeals: Logos, Ethos, and Pathos. They appeal to a reader’s sense of logos when they offer clear, reasonable premises and proofs when they speak, and make sure their listeners can follow the progression of ideas they are presenting. Teachers also use ethos when they demonstrate that they are credible, good-willed, and knowledgeable about their subjects, and when they connect with and appeal to the ethical or moral beliefs of the students. When speakers draw on the emotions of listeners and highlight them, they use pathos, the most powerful appeal and the most immediate, and that can be used to inculcate the values of a just and equitable society.

Teaching the connections between the words they work with in the classroom and the world outside can challenge and engage students in powerful ways as they find out how much they can use what they know of the means of persuasion to learn more. We need to bring a renewed emphasis to these most important skills. Encouraging students to observe how appeals work in their own listening and speaking will highlight to them the way the elements of diction, intonation, imagery, and syntax work. It makes students confident when they consciously exercise rhetoric. The work that you do to develop listening and speaking skills will be the single greatest gift you give to your students, one that will last a lifetime.

(The writer is a former civil servant enjoys traversing the myriad spaces of ideas, thinkers, and books.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.