ODEL – Open and Distance Education and Listening: The Need for Metacognitive Listening Strategies

Abstract

Traditionally teaching and learning implied speaking and listening – the master spoke and the learners listened. However, when the sounds died down, the words were gone forever. For that reason people in many cultures developed remarkable oral memory abilities, and learners and performers listened carefully and effectively, thereby managing to remember huge volumes of speech word-for-word. This paper provides a literature review of studies on listening skills, and its impact on academic success and failure. It also gives an overview of metacognitive listening strategies, touching upon how this can benefit students, but especially how educators can and should incorporate it in the way they prepare, present and deliver subject content to their students. The days are long gone where lecturers can merely dump subject knowledge onto students, without including metacognitive learning strategies such as reading and study skills, as well as listening skills. Technological advances are making it possible to make oral presentations as permanent as written ones, and therefore responsible tuition entails teaching in a way that it not only makes it easy for students to listen to presentations, but also teaching them how to listen to what is being taught. Technological advances likewise make it imperative that all educators, whether at contact or at Open Distance Learning (ODL) institutions, become aware and knowledgeable about this, and therefore we have to put Listening back into ODEL.

DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2014.v4n3p63