SPC1017 - Lesson 3 Notes on Effective Listening

Lesson Introduction

• Effective listening involves receiving, constructing meaning from, and responding to spoken and nonverbal messages.
• Listening is a frequently used but often neglected communication skill.
• This lesson covers the listening process, factors inhibiting listening, types of listening, and effective listening strategies.
• Listening is a skill that requires development through practice.
• Objective: Discuss three reasons why listening is important in our lives
• Objective: Describe how the process of listening differs from hearing
• Objective: Analyze how noise, perceptions, and your own characteristics can influence the listening process
• Objective: Apply critical thinking, nonverbal, and verbal strategies to become a better listener
• Objective: Apply strategies for effective listening to specific situations, including the workplace, the classroom, and mediated environments
• Objective: Apply ethical listening behaviors

The Importance of Listening

• Listening is crucial for communication.
• The International Listening Association found that individuals spend an average of 44% of their time listening, followed by speaking (25%), reading (13%), and writing (11%).
• College students spend 63% of their communication time listening, predominately in face-to-face situations.
• Digital and social media use increases listening time, with over 95% of people ages 13 to 17 accessing YouTube multiple times daily.
• Listening helps build and maintain relationships.
• Listening skills are influenced by family communication patterns.

Listening in Business

• Listening is an essential skill for business success.
• Executives emphasize listening to employees for effective and efficient ideas.
• Organizational cultures that emphasize listening promote positive communication and increase employee engagement.
• Social media listening, monitoring and responding to social media messages, is vital for organizations to track consumer opinions and make improvements.
• Organizations use social media listening/command centers to engage with customers, build brand awareness, respond to problems, and generate excitement.

Listening and Democracy

• True democracy involves listening to others in the community, as noted by John Dewey.
• Good listening requires sustained effort.
• The first step in becoming an effective listener is to understand the listening process and improve its enactment.

Defining Listening

• Hearing is the physical act of receiving sound, while listening is the active process of constructing meaning from messages. The two are not the same.
• Listening behaviors impact future hearing health. High volumes through headphones or earbuds can cause long-term hearing damage. Tinnitus, a constant ringing in the ears, affects over 50 million Americans and can be caused by allergies or benign tumors.
• Listening, according to the International Listening Association, is the active process of receiving, constructing meaning from, and responding to spoken and/or nonverbal messages, involving retaining information and reacting empathically or appreciatively.
• Active listening includes:
  • Listening carefully using all available senses
  • Paraphrasing what we hear both mentally and verbally
  • Checking our understanding to ensure accuracy
  • Providing feedback consisting of verbal and nonverbal responses to the speaker and the speaker’s message.
• Active listening occurs in different forms, including empathic listening and critical listening
  • Empathic listening is an attempt to understand the perspective of another person.
  • Critical listening involves challenging the speaker’s message by evaluating its accuracy, meaningfulness, and utility and goes hand in hand with critical listening.
• Listening for enjoyment occurs in relaxing or emotionally stimulating situations and can reduce pain in hospital patients.

Podcasts and Critical Thinking

• Listening for enjoyment and critical listening can be separate behaviors, but critical listening skills can be practiced while listening for enjoyment. For example, listening to podcasts also provides opportunities for critical thinking

The Listening Process

• The listening process involves receiving stimuli (music, words, sounds) in the ear, where vibrations are translated into sensations registered by the brain.
• For those who are deaf or hard of hearing, the stimuli received might be the visible behaviors of another person.
• The brain focuses attention on the stimuli and gives them meaning using working memory, which is a part of your short-term memory.
• The interpreted message is then stored in schema that reside in your long-term memory for immediate use or future recall.

Barriers to Effective Listening

• Barriers to effective listening can arise from natural human behavior.
• These barriers are related to attention, working memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory.

Attention

• Paying attention involves controlling selective and automatic attention.
• Selective attention is the sustained focus we give to important things.
• Automatic attention is the instinctive focus we give to important things in our surroundings.
• In any listening situation, we must manage our selective attention to keep it from being overwhelmed by our automatic attention.
• Selective attention means paying attention to multiple things. We quickly scan our surroundings and assess the importance of several items of interest as they relate to one another.
• Allowing selective attention to scan too much of one’s environment can overwhelm ones ability to make meaning of specific stimuli.
• When students text or use social media during class, their performance on quizzes and tests can drop by as much as one-and-a-half letter grades.

Working Memory

• Working memory is the part of our short-term memory that interprets and assigns meaning to things we hear.
• Our working memory looks for shortcuts when processing information and quickly recognizes patterns of sounds that represent words, phrases, and ideas.
• Using prior knowledge stored in long-term memory, working memory assigns meaning to what we are hearing and allows us to respond.
• Patterns of words or other symbols stored in long-term memory are used to apply shortcuts for assigning meaning.
• Research has found that when children have difficulty with language development, they have less efficient working memory. Helping children develop strong language skills early in life will likely help them become better listeners later.

Short-Term Memory

• Short-term memory is a temporary storage place for information.
• Short-term memory is limited in both the quantity of information stored and the length of time information is retained.
• In terms of quantity, short-term memory is limited to five to nine “bits” of information. A bit of information is any organized unit of information, including sounds, letters, words, sentences, or something less concrete, such as ideas, depending on the ability of working memory to recognize patterns.
• Short-term memory is also limited to about 20 seconds in duration unless some strategy, such as rehearsal, is used.
• Researchers have found that individuals recall only 50% of a message immediately after listening to it and only 25% after a short delay.
• Relying on our short-term memory is not a substitute for trying to encode information into long-term memory.

Long-Term Memory

• Information processed in working memory can also be stored in long-term memory for later recall.
• Similarly, information temporarily stored in short-term memory can be deemed important and subsequently stored in long-term memory.
• Long-term memory is our permanent storage place for information, including past experiences; language; values; knowledge; images of people; memories of sights, sounds, and smells; and even fantasies.
• Long-term memory has no known limitations in the quantity or duration of stored information.
• Thoughts are organized according to schemas, which are organizational “filing systems” for thoughts held in long-term memory and can be thought of as an interconnected web of information.
• Our ability to remember information in long-term memory is dependent on finding connections to the correct schema containing the particular memory, thought, idea, or image we are trying to recall.
• When we try to access information in long-term memory, we access schemas holding needed information through the use of stimulus cues, which can be words, images, or even smells and tastes. If the cue we receive does not give us enough information to access the corresponding schema, we may be unable to recall the information.
• Long-term memory plays a key role in the listening process. As we receive sounds, our working memory looks for patterns based on schemas contained in our long-term memory. Thus, our ability to use language, to recognize concepts, and to interpret meaning is based on the schemas we accumulate over a lifetime. If we encounter new information that does not relate to a preexisting schema, our working memory instructs our long-term memory to create a new schema to hold the information.

Listenting Barriers

• A strong correlation exists between listening skills and workplace productivity.
• Effective and empathetic listening is one of the most important factors in promoting workplace productivity.
• Employers find it difficult to find individuals with good listening skills.

Types of Barriers

• Noise:
  • Physical distractions in the environment that keep you from focusing on the message
  • Mental distractions when the mind wanders when it is supposed to be focusing on something
  • Multitasking, or trying to do two or more tasks simultaneously
  • Factual distractions when focusing so intently on details that you miss the main point
  • Semantic distractions occur when you over respond to an emotion-laden word or concept
• Perceptions of Others:
  • Status: Devoting attention based on the social standing, rank, or perceived value of another
  • Stereotypes: Treating individuals as if they were the same as others in a given category.
  • Sights and sounds: Letting appearances or voice qualities affect your listening.
• Yourself:
  • Egocentrism is excessive self-focus or seeing yourself as the central concern in every conversation.
  • Defensiveness arises when acting threatened and feeling as though you must defend what you have said or done
  • Experiential superiority occurs when looking down on others as if their life experiences were not as good as yours
  • Personal bias: Letting your own predispositions, or strongly held beliefs, interfere with your ability to interpret information correctly
  • Pseudolistening, or pretending to listen but letting your mind or attention wander to something else

Modern and Climate Challenges

• The proliferation of noise created by humans is starting to cause distractions.
• Smartphones and other personal communication devices diminish face-to-face communication skills, such as listening.
• Listening to loud, fast music significantly diminishes our ability to comprehend things we read or hear.
• When we multitask, we place greater strain on our working memory and short-term memory, which can impede all other aspects of our ability to process information.
• The current polarized social and political climate has created poor listening habits with people who have different views becoming reactionary and disagreeing in a knee jerk response creating “group polarization”. One way to counteract that is to practice good listening.
• Individuals can have authentic disagreement on particular issues. However, for any two (or more) people, there are also many points of agreement, rather than saying that you will simply agree to disagree, you should listen carefully for points of common ground.

Generational Differences

• Individuals born after 1997, commonly referred to as Generation Z, are significantly more likely than previous generations to engage in evaluative listening, which is associated with being critical and argumentative with another.

Ways to Become a Better Listener

• Recognize Differences in Listening
• Listen and Think Critically
• Use Verbal and Nonverbal Communication Effectively
• Check Your Understanding
• Take Good Notes

Recognize Differences

• Recognize that we all have different tendencies that can influence how we listen to others.
• Gender can influence listening habits.
  • Men tend to be more instrumental or task-oriented when communicating.
  • Women tend to be more relationally oriented.
• Debra Tannen suggests that men and women have very distinct communication styles, which influence everything from how they use vocal inflections to how they listen

Differences in Listening Charachteristics between Men and Woman:

Listen and Think Critically

• Critical listening and critical thinking go hand in hand.
• Critical listening is a form of active listening in which you carefully analyze the accuracy, meaningfulness, and utility of a speaker’s message.
• Critical thinking involves analyzing the speaker, the situation, and the speaker’s ideas to make critical judgments about the message being presented. One way to think critically is to analyze the communication situation to find cues about the situation and suggest key things to remain aware of while listening.
• A second skill in critical listening is to analyze the credibility of the speaker.

Determining Credibility

• One way of analyzing the credibility of speakers is to determine whether they are reporting something they have seen or experienced personally or something they have heard from someone else. Also important is whether they are providing factual accounts or opinions.
  • Is the person presenting observations or inferences?
  • If presenting observations, are they first-person or second-person?
• The speaker’s sincerity, trustworthiness, passion, and use of evidence and reasoning is also something you might take into account to refine your assessment of the speaker’s credibility.
• A final step in critical thinking is to analyze the arguments the speaker is making. One of the simplest ways of analyzing an argument is to use Stephen Toulmin’s concepts of data, claim, and warrant.
• Claim: The overall point or conclusion of the argument.
• Data: Consist of factual or agreed-upon evidence.
• Warrant: Develop a logical connection, or bridge, between the agreed-upon data and the claim.

Nonverbal Communication

The following nonverbal skills are essential to demonstrating active listening:

1. Demonstrate bodily responsiveness. Use movement and gestures to show your awareness of the speaker’s message.
2. Lean forward. By leaning toward the speaker, you demonstrate interest in the speaker.
3. Use direct body orientation. Do not angle yourself away from the speaker; instead, sit or stand so that you are directly facing the speaker.
4. Maintain relaxed but alert posture. Your posture should not be tense or “proper,” but neither should it be so relaxed that you appear to be resting.
5. Establish an open body position. Sit or stand with your body open to the other person. Crossing your arms or legs may be more comfortable, but that posture frequently suggests that you are closed off psychologically as well as physically.
6. Use positive, responsive facial expressions and head movement. You can demonstrate your interest by nodding your head to show interest or agreement.
7. Establish direct eye contact. The speaker will be watching your eyes for interest.
8. Sit or stand close to the speaker. Establishing close proximity to the speaker has two benefits.
9. Be vocally responsive. Change your pitch, rate, inflection, and volume as you respond to the speaker showing that you are actually listening, in contrast to responding in a standard, patterned manner that suggests you are only appearing to listen.
10. Provide supportive utterances. Sometimes you can demonstrate more concern through nonverbal sounds, such as “mmm,” “mmm-hmm,” and “uh-huh” than you can by stating, “Yes, I understand."

Verbal Communication

To measure your current competence in verbal communication, consider the skills you regularly practice:

1. Invite additional comments. Suggest that the speaker add more details or give additional information.
2. Ask questions. One method of inviting the speaker to continue is to ask direct questions, requesting more in-depth details, definitions, or clarification.
3. Identify areas of agreement or common experience. Briefly relate similar past experiences, or briefly explain a similar point of view that you hold.
4. Vary verbal responses. Use a variety of responses, such as “Yes,” “I see,” “Go on,” and “Right,” instead of relying on one standard, unaltered response, such as “Yes,” “Yes,” and “Yes."
5. Provide clear verbal responses. Use specific and concrete words and phrases in your feedback to the speaker.
6. Use descriptive, nonevaluative responses. It is better to say, “Your statistics are from an organization that is biased against gun control,” which is descriptive, than to say, “Your speech was a bunch of lies,” which is evaluative.
7. Provide affirmative and affirming statements. Comments such as “Yes,” “I see,” “I understand,” and “I know” provide affirmation.
8. Avoid complete silence. The lack of any response suggests that you are not listening to the speaker.
9. Allow other people the opportunity of a complete hearing. When you discuss common feelings or experiences, avoid dominating the conversation.

Checking Understanding

You can check your understanding by practicing these skills:

1. Ask questions for clarification. Before testing your understanding of the speaker’s message, make sure you have a clear idea of what is being said.
2. Paraphrase the speaker’s message. Using “I statements,” attempt to paraphrase what you think the speaker was saying so that the speaker can determine whether your understanding matches what was intended.
3. Paraphrase the speaker’s intent. Using “I statements,” attempt to paraphrase what you interpret as the intent or motivation of the speaker.
4. Identify areas of confusion. If there are specific aspects of the message that you are still confused about, mention those to the speaker while you are expressing your initial understanding of the message.
5. Invite clarification and correction. Asking the speaker to correct your interpretation of the message will invite additional explanation.
6. Go back to the beginning. As necessary, return to the first step in this process to check your new understanding of the speaker’s message and intent.

Taking Notes

Note-taking is one of the most effective skills you can develop as a listener, particularly as a college student. Several options, or formats, are available to you as a note-taker, including the narrative method, the matrix method, the outline method, the mind-map method, and the Cornell method.

• The narrative method uses complete sentences and paragraph structure to try to record ideas as close as possible to word-for-word.
• The matrix method organizes information into rows and columns, similar to what a spreadsheet looks like.
• The outline method uses numbers and letters to indicate main points and subordinate points, respectively.
• The mind-map method uses a web-like diagram to show how concepts are connected.
• The Cornell method uses columns to organize information. For this method, you will divide your paper into a wide column on the right and a narrow column on the left.
• The most effective note-takers use combinations of each method depending on the circumstances.

Listening in Different Situations

Most listening skills will serve you well in every communication situation. Listening critically, mastering nonverbal cues, and checking your understanding will always aid your comprehension of the message.

Workplace Listenting Skills

The following are some other listening skills that will benefit you in the workplace:

• Be deliberate in paying attention to others who are speaking.
• Refrain from interrupting others when they are talking, even if you are agreeing with them.
• Seek to understand what others are saying before providing a verbal reaction.
• Verbally summarize what you view as the key takeaways and action items that were discussed in a meeting.

Classroom Listenting Skills

Effective lecture listening constitutes the ability to listen to, mentally process, and recall lecture information. Michael Gilbert provides the following general suggestions:

1. Find areas of interest in what you are listening to. Constantly look for how you can use the information.
2. Remain open. Avoid the temptation to focus only on the lecturer’s delivery; withhold evaluative judgments until the lecturer has finished.
3. Work at listening. Capitalize on your mind’s ability to think faster than the lecturer can talk.
4. Avoid letting distractions distract. Monitor your attention and recognize when it is waning.
5. Listen for and note main ideas. Focus on the central themes of what is being presented and make notes about those themes.

Lecture Cues

Research has also examined the importance of lecture cues for students. While taking notes, you should listen and watch for these types of cues.

Listenting to Media

To be an effective listener in a mediated culture, individuals have to have information literacy defined by the American Library Association in the following way: “To be information literate an individual must recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate and use effectively the information needed.”

Listenting in a Second Language

Research suggests that second-language listening development requires two skills: vocabulary comprehension and metacognitive awareness.

Ethical Listening

To be an ethical listener, you should practice the following behaviors:

1. Recognize the sources of your own conversational habits. Your family, school, and other life experiences have allowed you to develop certain habits, which in some situations could be strengths and in others could represent areas for improvement.
2. Monitor your communication to recognize when you are engaging in poor listening behaviors.
3. Apply general ethical principles to how you respond. Planning your responses so that you are respectful to others is an example of how your personal ethics can influence your listening behaviors.
4. Adapt to others. Recognize that other people also have unique communication styles and that you might need to adapt your listening behaviors so that you can fully understand what they are trying to say.