Developing Accounting Students' Listening Skills: Barriers, Opportunities and an Integrated Stakeholder Approach

Abstract

Accountants and employers of accounting graduates consider listening to be among the most important communication skills that graduates possess. However, accounting education practices that develop students' listening skills are uncommon. Further, in the case of listening development, the current approach of prescribing that educators do more to rectify students' skill deficiencies overlooks barriers that prevent greater incorporation of listening instruction in the accounting curriculum. An alternative integrated stakeholder approach to develop students' listening skills is proposed. Informed by a broad range of education literature, the approach identifies cross-disciplinary listening development best practice and barriers to the widespread implementation of such practices in the typical accounting programme, before determining and assigning interrelated listening development roles to key stakeholders who will benefit from improved student listening. While student listening development is feasible under the proposed approach, shared contributions by accounting students, the profession and educators are needed to achieve enhanced skills outcomes.

Keywords:

• Listening skills
• accounting education
• lifelong learning
• graduate attributes

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the guidance of the anonymous reviewers and participants at the 2012 AFAANZ conference in Melbourne, Australia, which greatly improved this paper.

Notes

Listening skills encompass the ability to interpret both the verbal information and the non-verbal information which that a speaker conveys by way of their facial and physical expressions during face-to-face communication (Agrawal and Schmidt, 2003; Brown and Barker, 2001).

The term ‘subject’ refers to the courses, units or modules which that comprise a degree programme.

Further consideration of this ‘realignment of accounting education between universities and professional bodies’ (Jackling and de Lange, 2009, p. 381) lies beyond the scope of this paper's focus.

The bodies are the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia (ICAA), CPA Australia, the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA), the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), the New Zealand Institute of Chartered Accountants (NZICA) and the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA).