The number of job-to-job moves by American workers tells a bleak storyListening is as active as speaking (the other receptive skill), and in some ways even more difficult. It well requires attention, thought, interpretation, and imagination. To improve learners' listening skills we should let them: 1. Adopt a positive attitude. 2. Be responsive. 3. Shut out distractions. 4. Listen for the speaker's purpose. 5. Look for the signals of what is to come. 6. Look for summaries of what has gone before. 7. Evaluate the supporting materials. 8. Look for non-verbal clues. In order to teach listening skills, a teacher should firstly state the difficulties. For a student of a foreign language, accurate and intelligent listening is a necessity, and the teacher is responsible to help his / her learners to acquire this skill which provides the very foundation for learning and functioning in a language. That the teacher can observe and isolate the errors in speaking, but could not in listening. In listening, the learner can exercise no controls over the structural and lexical range of the speaker to whom he is listening. Nevertheless, any listener can learn to focus on significant content items, to explain in another way he can learn to listen selectively. Self-control questions: 1. What is listening? 2. Name types of listening. 3. Name types of listeners. 4. why teaching listening is important?
Tr 7 Free exchange Go for the churn http://www.economist.com/node/21547224 от перемены рабочих мест сумма не изменяется The number of job-to-job moves by American workers tells a bleak story Feb 11th 2012 | from the print edition FIGURES on employment tend to encourage a black-or-white view of an economy. Either conditions are worsening and firms are shedding workers, as they did by the hundreds of thousands in 2008 and 2009, or times are improving and businesses are creating new jobs. Spirits leapt on February 3rd on news that America’s private businesses boosted their payrolls by 257,000 jobs in January, capping the country’s best 12-month employment performance in the private sector for over five years. But the headline figures represent just the tip of a large labour-market iceberg. Data provided by the relatively new Jobs Openings and Labour Turnover Survey (JOLTS) illuminate these depths. Even in the darkest of days, labour markets remain busy. Growing firms hire to expand and even shrinking businesses seek out workers to fill important vacant positions. In December 2008, for instance, overall American employment dropped by nearly 700,000 jobs. Yet in that month more workers—over 4.1m in total—were hired into new positions than in December of last year, when net payrolls grew by 203,000. During a relatively placid economic period like the mid-2000s, about 65% of all hiring is associated with what economists have dubbed “churn”—the job-to-job movement of workers through the labour force, which neither adds to nor subtracts from total employment. Of the 12m or so hires that occurred in a typical pre-recession quarter, some 8m came from firms luring workers away from other firms. Churn is a mechanism by which labour markets reallocate workers towards more efficient ends. In the typical job-to-job move (that is, without any intervening stint of unemployment) an American worker can expect a rise in wages of over 8%. This gain represents, at least in part, an improvement in productivity. As workers obtain skills and find better job matches, their output and earnings rise. And as firms obtain ever more suitable labour, they can afford to pay higher wages. In this way, the churning of the labour market contributes to growth in the potential output of the economy. Although this ebb and flow is always happening, its strength is subject to the forces of the business cycle. When hard times hit, workers are less likely to make the leap from one firm to another. And when employees do move, firms are often reluctant to fill the freshly vacated positions. In a new analysis* Edward Lazear of Stanford University and James Spletzer from the Bureau of Labour Statistics examine how the recent recession affected these job-to-job moves. Just 9m workers were hired in the second quarter of 2009—the last of the recession—down from 12.8m in the fourth quarter of 2007, a fall of about 30%. About 80% of this decline in hiring was attributable to a fall in churn rather than a decline in job creation (see left-hand chart). The number of workers voluntarily leaving a job fell by nearly 40%, for instance. The pace of job creation in the economy slowed sharply, it is true, but most of the hiring chill can be attributed to a decline in churn.
A freeze of this sort matters. Based on the typical wage gain from job-to-job moves, Mr Lazear and Mr Spletzer estimate the efficiency cost of reduced labour-market churn during the crisis at about 0.4% of GDP a year between the onset of recession in December 2007 and the middle of 2011. That is the equivalent of $208 billion of lost output—a small hit compared with the impact of the recession itself but a meaningful and underappreciated economic cost of prolonged labour-market weakness. This cost falls disproportionately on the young. Individuals who graduate from college and enter the labour force during a typical recession can expect an initial earnings loss of about 9% (compared with what they might expect in normal circumstances). This decline can be mitigated and eventually eliminated by leaps from firm to firm, through which young workers obtain new skills and find ever better ways to use their talents. That process is frustrated by a general slowing of labour-market churn. A pickup in hiring alone is not enough to grant the labour market a clean bill of health, according to this analysis. Just as important is whether workers feel comfortable leaving the security of an old job for the prospect of higher returns in a new one. If a falling unemployment rate does not translate into more risk-taking among workers in jobs, then the labour market may be further from normality than is appreciated.
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