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Listen, to Hear and Be Heard

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Submitted By junadmar
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Listen, to hear and be heard by June Hamid
Listening is a natural way to learn a language, and more so for the English Language, where you hear the variety of speakers in their element. Just listen, and you could learn and enjoy all that the English Language can offer and more. The idea is simple enough, and altogether very easy to do. As one of the main functional skills in mastering the English Language, listening is very important. However it is often under used, and even under rated. The other skills, are reading, writing and speaking. Reading of course, goes hand in hand in building a foundation, and was given quite a prominence in my previous article ‘Hey you speak good English’.
Listening, as I have often referenced with my audiences, is integral in honing both English proficiency and communication skills, and is crucial to understanding your audience (of one or hundred), who is the ultimate receiver and decipherer of your either very straightforward or convoluted message. In fact, I am very glad that it recently became infamous and was even emphasized up to eleven (11) times in a not too recent storm in a teacup/ debacle involving two very opinionated speakers. Of which, much has already been said about ‘that’ incident, but I tend to think that something very good came out of all this.
For one, and for quite a reasonable time, the word ‘listen’ firmly entrenched itself in the mainstream psyche through advertisements using the word to flog everything from restaurant meals, car tune ups and everything else in between, and also extended itself to articles on Communication Skills etc. All this did much to elevate, a core skill in English proficiency, which I was very happy about, since all action must accumulatively have a resultant qualitative outcome. So, through that interesting situation in a university no less, not too long ago, and which caused much

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