Importance of Adopting Measures to Develop Listening and Speaking Skills at the Secondary and Higher Secondary Levels: An Empirical Study

Abstract

Listening and speaking are the two important skills of communicative competence in Second Language Acquisition (SLA). This article focuses on the importance of introducing and practicing listening and speaking skills at the secondary and higher secondary levels of education. Through this attempt I have also tried to find out the reasons for poor communicative competence in English at the tertiary level. At the secondary and higher secondary levels where Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is in practice reading and writing are given maximum importance. Since speaking and listening are not assessed like the other two skills, they remain unattended throughout the students ' academic career. Because of the lack of practice of listening and speaking skills the students are not able to communicate in English even after reaching the tertiary level of education. Giving importance to the development of these two skills the study has been done through questionnaire survey from200 students of the 1st and the 2nd semester of Premier University, Chittagong (PUC). The survey result shows that they think that if listening and speaking skills were introduced and practiced in the classes of secondary and higher secondary levels, the students would be benefited more in learning the language.