Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Reading is better than listening in improving our language

Reading is better than Listening
           
As is commonly understood, reading is a skill to pronounce words and a skill to identify words and their meaning while listening is considered to be the one of the most important part of the oral communication. This can be seen that, by reading and listening can improves student’s quality of language. It is believed that reading is better than listening. This will be proven by analysing the difference and similarity between reading and listening in terms of understanding and learning.

Firstly, understanding is important to improve student’s quality of language because of the level of concentration. For example reading a book and listening to an audiobook. This example clearly shows that when students reading a book, they can easily re-read the part of the book that they could not understand and they can do it in their own pace. Similarly, they also can read without really paying attention to what their reading. In contrast, with an audiobook, sometimes there is a problem that the story is going on too slowly or it’s at a boring part so they just have to wait. In addition, the way that native speakers speak their language is often quite fast and with a lot of slang, so it can be different from what they have learned in the class room. From this, it can be concluded that understanding is a tool to improve our language skills.

Secondly, why reading and listening enhance student’s quality of language is because of the good information in learning. By reading, it will help to improve the vocabulary and it increases the student’s knowledge base to help them make more informed decisions. For instance, learning how to listen can help you with reading. It is obvious when looking at this example, if you make the connection between the spoken word and the written word, you can learn how to read more easily and how to understand what you are reading. In addition, listening skills help you to figure out what the main idea and important facts are, which is helpful with reading as well. From this, it can be concluded that students can enhance their quality of language by mastering or learning the skills of listening and reading.

After analysing the areas of understanding and learning, it is strongly stressed that by reading and listening, the quality of language among students can be improved. As has been proven, there are difference and similarity between reading and listening. Nevertheless, in my opinion, reading is better than listening because listening can be a passive thing, reading almost never it is.