Listening is an invisible mental process, making it difficult to describe. Listeners must discriminate between sounds, understand vocabulary and grammatical structures, interpret stress and intention, retain and interpret this within the immediate as well as the larger socio-cultural context of the utterance (Wipf 1984: 345).
Underwood (1993: 1), for example, defines listening as the activity of paying attention to and trying to get meaning from something we hear. To listen successfully to spoken language, we need to be able to work out what the speakers mean when they use particular words in particular ways on particular occasions, and not simply to understand the words themselves.
Similarly, Saricoban (1999: 19) noted that listening is the ability to understand what others are saying which involves understanding their accent or pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, and grasping the meaning conveyed.
From the definitions above, it could be concluded that listening is an interactive activity in which listeners employ a variety of process and need to pay attention in order to receive a message and understand the meaning what others are saying.