Listening as the Major Language Processing Skill of Spoken Interaction

The paper gives an overview of contemporary approaches for the role of listening in spoken interaction: listening has not to be treated as discrete from speaking and has been defined as not just a one-time event but an overall life competency (the medium through which people gain a large proportion of their education, their information, their understanding of the world and human affairs, their ideals, sense of values).Listening was characterized as the process occurring in the following stages: (1) receiving, (2) understanding, (3) remembering, (4) evaluating, and ( 5) responding.Taking into consideration the fact that individuals judge the listening ability of others by their responses, it was theoretically proved that responding in socially appropriate ways enhances the communication flow, thus, the article draws attention to the concept of listenership in conversation, listeners have to be active, showing that they are listening: between speaking and listening there must be vocalization of understanding.Interactive vocabulary and grammar of conversation was analyzed.The material clearly demonstrated that adjectives and adverbs as discourse sensitive words class in English function as response tokens, being a powerful tool to the listener showing comprehension, acknowledgement and engagement, so listenership has been claimed to be considered the skill of human verbal interaction: people don't just listen, they listen and respond, showing that they listen properly, creating the continuity and flow in conversation, that have a crucial impact on the trajectory of talk.It was found out that every turn of conversation, apart from the opening turn, might be viewed as a response to the turn that has gone before, thus managing conversation as a whole.It is believed that if speaking and listening come together and are taught together, it'll increasingly develop the trainees' competence and fluency in English to an extent for them to become good models of effective communication.