Journal of Social Science Research Vol 16 (2020) ISSN: 2321-1091 https://rajpub.com/index.php/jssr 99 DOI: https://doi.org/10.24297/jssr.v16i.8863 Listening skill among socially disadvantaged students in relation to academic performance at higher education in West Bengal Chayan Adak 1 Bijoy Krishna Panda 2 1 Research Scholar, Department of Education, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India 2 Assistant Professor, Department of Education, Raiganj University, West Bengal, India Email: chayanadak@outlook.com, bijoy.panda@gmail.com Abstract Listening is the key to all effective communication. Good listening ability helps a person to make ideas, processing information, making pertinent comments, and ask relevant questions. This study aimed to understand existing listening skills among the socially disadvantaged students based on different demographic indicators and check whether listening skill and academic performance are somehow related when both the category of students are considered in higher education in West Bengal. Undergraduate freshman students of college and universities at West Bengal consisted of the population for the study where 225 students who regularly attended the course after successful completion of the higher secondary level selected as sample. Major findings revealed that the gender, stream, and medium of instruction has a significant contribution in a variation of listening skill (p<0.05); also, listening skill and academic performance is positively correlated with high statistical significance (p<0.01). Keywords – Listening skill, Socially Disadvantaged Student, Academic Performance, Higher Education Introduction Listening is conterminal with hearing, but hearing is merely a component of listening process. It is way more complex process than hearing. Listening is the ability to understand words contained in a dialogue and make use of the knowledge for personal growth and development (Dadzie, 2008). For effective teaching-learning, listening is a key element which takes place between listener and speaker. Good listening ability helps a person to make ideas, processing information, making pertinent comments, and ask relevant questions. Listening as a skill, involves receiving, attending, organizing, understanding, interpreting and evaluating messages from the classroom environment (Friedman, 1986). A listener is actively engaging in the listening process as well as decodes the speakers’ message actively. ‘The Vedas’, the Hindu scripture showed that the listening or ‘shruti’ was the proved source of knowledge and ‘shruti’ was also synonymous of ‘Veda s’ and a receptive skill (Harmer, 1991). Discriminating between sounds, recognizing words and understanding their meaning, using prior knowledge to predict and confirm meaning, recalling important words and ideas are some key component of listening. Many researchers mentioned that the process of listening occurs in most probably in five stages- • Hearing – Hearing is perception of sound waves; hearing is necessary for listening. Hearing with full attention is an important requirement of effective listening. • Understanding – What person have been heard if he/she understand the meaning of that thing, which involves in listening. • Remembering – Remembering is also a part of listening process because it indicates that an individual is has received and interpreted a message, also had added it into schemata. • Evaluating – Active listeners can evaluate the message properly. He/ She can understand that proper message through evaluating, and it is essential for the KISS communication. • Responding – It is the last stage of the process and after hearing, understanding, remembering and evaluating the message, the receiver must give feedback because the speaker has no other way to determine if a message has been received or not.