The Role of Multimodal Features in Active Listening for Teamwork

Teamwork is crucial for engineering education as students need to communicate and collaborate with individuals and groups to arrive at a common consensus. A fundamental component of effective communication is active listening, for it plays a vital role in improving team skills. This study explores the impact of active listening on team engagement in an engineering classroom setting. The main components for the assessment and analysis of active listening are multimodal cues, such as verbal, nonverbal, and behavioral factors. To collect the relevant data, a mixed-method approach was used combining group discussions, observations, and statistical analysis. As per the results, there is a significant improvement in team engagement when students listen actively during the teamwork. Thus, the investigation points to the importance of active listening and the effect of multimodal cues on team engagement. The study also implies that language instructors can foster active listening in the engineering students by enabling them to focus on multimodal cues.