MID-TERM EXAM TERM PAPER SPRING 2020

(Session 2019-2023)

COURSE TITLE
Language Comprehension and Presentation Skills

SUBMITTED BY
Muhammad Salman

ROLL NO
BBAF19M019

NAME OF EXAMINER
Sidra Shareef

PROGRAM
BBA (4 year) REGULAR

NOON BUSINESS SCHOOL

UNIVERSITY OF SARGODHA
Q.No.1:
What is the Significance of Listening? Justify whether Listening as a skill could
be attributed to an individual personality trait or as an acquired expertize?
Answer:
Significance of Listening
Listening is the ability to receive and interpret messages in a complete and
accurate way in the communication process. Listening is not just hearing to what the
other party is saying. Listening means that the “listening with great interest to what is
being told to us.”
The poet Alice Duer Miller said: “You can listen like a blank wall or like a
splendid auditorium where every sound comes back fuller and richer.”1
Listening is considered priority, the ability to think verbally and communicate
with others. Therefore, it is a skill that clarifies all verbal communication.
It is recommended that listening can be done in limited way, or in a way that
enriches communication. Goodith said that:
“Listening is not merely not talking, it means taking a full human interest in what
is being told to us. You can listen like blank mall where every sounds comes back
fuller and richer.”(Miller, Goodith, 2001, 48)
Listening is the ability to identify what the speaker is saying through
understanding his accent, pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. “Rost” explained
some sub-components of listening, those are:

Discrimination between voices

Recognize the words

Identify the stress and group words

Identify actions in conversations

Use background knowledge and context to make predictions and verify
meaning

Expressing key words, titles and ideas

Giving appropriate feed-back to the speaker

Correct what the speaker said
Rost insists on the facts when someone wants to assign students all these abilities
to feel the process of success, he said:
“Successful listening involves an integration of these component skills. In this
sense, listening is a harmony of the component skills not the individual skills

1
https://www.thoughtco.com/listening-communication-term-1691247
 themselves. This integration of these skills creates a person’s listening
ability.(Rost, 147)
The Active nature of Listening Comprehension:
Listening comprehension is a scientific process of developing meanings that the
speaker intends, through the complete involvement of the hearer.
Little wood said that “More positive listening self concepts can be created by
helping students realize that word-for-word comprehension is not necessary and that
guessing and hypothesis testing are valuable.”(Little Wood, 2000)
“It is therefore not enough that he should merely be ableto understand the same
range of language that he can speak; receptive repertoire must be matched not
against his own productive repertoire, but against the productive repertoire of the
native speakers he will needed to understand.” (Littlewood, 2000) (P65)

Listening is a natural characteristic of a person due to which he hears different

sounds. For example, he hears both good and bad sounds. Some people hear different
voices according to their personality.
Buck said that:
“"Listeners assume that acoustic input is first decoded into phonemes, then this is
used to identify individual words, then processing continues on to the next higher stage,
the syntactic level followed by an analysis of semantic content to arrive at a literal
understanding of the basic linguistic meaning . Finally, the listener interprets that literal
meaning in terms of communicative situation to understand what the speaker means.”
(Buck, 2001, 2)
Q.No.2:
What is Pronunciation? What are the different elements that make pronunciation
effective?
Answer:
Pronunciation
Pronunciation in which language spoken, the way in which a word is pronounced,
the way a person speaks the words of language.
Elements of Pronunciation
There are following elements of Pronunciation:
1. Vowels:
Vowels is made by voiced which are gowing through different mouth-shapes, the
differences in the shapes of the mouth that are caused by different positions of tongue and
lips. There are two types of vowels, namely pure vowel and diphthongs.
Pure vowels are represented by a single character; consist of long vowel and short
vowel. Long vowel is characterized by a length mark made of two dots or colon. There
are five long vowels in English, those are:
1. /i:/ = feel 2. /a:/ = garden 3. /u:/ = true
4. /ↄ:/ = all 5. /з:/ = dirty
There are five short vowels, those are:
1. /I/ = kill 2. /ᵊ / = about 3. /o/ = stop
4. /ᴧ / = enough 5. /u/ = push
2. Diphthongs:
A diphthong is the mixture of two vowel sounds that slide together and become
as one long vowel, taking up only one syllable together. In some languages this doesn’t
occur.
Some languages allow diphthongs in special positions such as the end of a word.
It is exceptional to have as many diphthongs, or the same diphthongs.
3. Consonants:
Sounds which are not vowels are consonants. Consonants are produced when
there are some obstacles made by two articles against the outgoing wind somewhere in
the mouth cavity. There are many types of Consonants but we are discuss only three
types, those are:
Plosive consonants:
The way of producing a plosive consonant is mainly characterized by a complete
obstruction somewhere along the way of speech, and after that the wind is suddenly
released so that an explosive sound is heard. There are following plosive consonants:
p, t, k, b, d and g

Fricative consonant:
A fricative consonant is produced when the outgoing wind meets with the
reducing the air flow and the obstruction of outgoing wind is said to be partially. There
are following fricative consonants:
f, v, s, z, r, and h
Affricative consonant:
An affricative is a type of stop, the outgoing wind also meets with a complete
obstruction somewhere in the mouth. However, the stoppage in a stop is suddenly
released. There are only two affricative produced at the same point of articulation.
One is sound /dƷ/ and the other is sound /tᶴ /.
4. Voicing:
Some sounds are made by our voices and some are not. Vowels are voiced but
some consonants are not voiced e.g. b, d, g, z, m, n, l, r, w and y
5. Aspiration:
Some plosive consonants are aspirated, e.g. “p”. That means that there is a little
puff of wind after the voice. In English the aspiration is not significant and there are no
minimal pairs where it makes a difference in meaning, and we are eager at the starting of
words but not in the middle or last. If we are making a point or trying to accentuate
something we may add aspiration, without affecting the meaning of sounds. However, in
other languages the aspiration may be more relevant.
If students say a word such as “paper” without the expected aspiration, it can
sound like they are instead using the voiced consonant “b.” It can sound a little
confusing, so it is worth explaining aspiration to students.
6. Stress:
Stress is an essential feature of the word in English. Stress can be divided into
three kinds of stress; strong stress, medium stress and weak stress. Stress has an
important has an important role in English because of different stress.
7. Intonation:
Intonation is the movement of the sound between high and low pitch. Intonation is
used to express a great number of different meanings, including emotions and attitudes.
The word ‘Yes’, for example can be said with falling voice, a rising voice can make
‘Yes’ mean ‘I agree’ or ‘Perhaps it is true’ or any number of other things.
8. Syllable:
Syllable is a sound unit in a word. For example: you clap your hand one time
when saying ‘‘May’’ and three times when saying “December.” May has one syllable and
December has three syllables. For example:
Start-------------------- One Syllable
Be-gin----------------- Two Syllables
Go-vern-ment-------- Three Syllables
E-du-ca-tion---------- Four Syllables