What is a Listening Skills?
Listening is the ability to accurately receive and
interpret messages in the communication process.
Listen to the conversation about the human body and do
the exercises to practise and improve your listening skills.
Listen to the speakers and do the exercises to practise
and improve your listening skills.
Most people are poor listeners. Even when
we think we are listening carefully, we usually grasp only half of what we
hear, and we retain even less. Improving your listening skills can be helpful
in every part of your life, including speechmaking.
The most important cause of poor listening
is giving in to distractions and letting our thoughts wander. Sometimes,
however, we listen too hard. We try to remember every word a speaker says, and
we lose the main message by concentrating on details. In other situations, we
may jump to conclusions and prejudge a speaker without hearing out the message.
Finally, we often judge people by their appearance or speaking manner instead
of listening to what they say.
You can overcome these poor listening
habits by taking several steps. First, take listening seriously and commit
yourself to becoming a better listener. Second, work at being an active
listener. Give your undivided attention to the speaker in a genuine effort to
understand her or his ideas. Third, resist distractions. Make a conscious
effort to keep your mind on what the speaker is saying. Fourth, try not to be
diverted by appearance or delivery. Set aside preconceived judgments based on a
person's looks or manner of speech. Fifth, suspend judgment until you have
heard the speaker's entire message. Sixth, focus your listening by paying
attention to main points, to evidence, and to the speaker’s techniques.
Finally, develop your note- taking skills. When done properly, note taking is
an excellent way to improve your concentration and to keep track of a speaker's
ideas.
Listening Is
Important
Although most people listen poorly there
are exceptions. Top-flight business executives, successful politicians,
brilliant teachers—nearly all are excellent listeners. So much of what they do
depends on absorbing information that is given verbally—and absorbing it
quickly and accurately. If you had an interview with the president of a major
corporation, you might be shocked (and flattered) to see how closely that
person listened to your words.
In our communication-oriented age,
listening is more important than ever. According to one study, more than 60
percent of errors made in business come from poor listening. Replacing poor
listening with good listening improves efficiency, sales, customer
satisfaction, and employee morale. This is why, in most companies, effective
listeners hold higher positions and are promoted more often than ineffective
listeners. When business managers are asked to rank-order the communication
skills most crucial to their jobs, they usually rank listening number one.5
Even if you don't plan to be a corporate
executive, the art of listening can be helpful in almost every part of your
life. This is not surprising when you realize that people spend more time
listening than in any other communicative activity—more than reading, more
than writing, more even than speaking.
Think for a moment about your own life as
a college student. Most class time in U.S. colleges and universities is spent
listening to discussions and lectures. A number of studies have shown a strong
correlation between listening and academic success. Students with the highest
grades are usually those with the strongest listening skills. The reverse is
also true—students with the lowest grades are usually those with the weakest
listening skills.
There is plenty of reason, then, to take
listening seriously. Employers and employees, parents and children, wives and
husbands, doctors and patients, students and teachers—all depend on the
apparently simple skill of listening. Regardless of your profession or walk of
life, you never escape the need for a well-trained ear.
Listening is also important to you as a
speaker. It is probably the way you get most of your ideas and information—from
television, radio, conversation, and lectures. If you do not listen well, you
will not understand what you hear and may pass along your misunderstanding to
others.
Besides, in class—as in life—you will
listen to many more speeches than you give. It is only fair to pay close
attention to your classmates' speeches; after all, you want them to listen
carefully to your speeches. An excellent way to improve your own
speeches is to listen attentively to the speeches of other people. Over and
over, instructors find that the best speakers are usually the best listeners.
Listening and Critical Thinking
One of the ways listening can serve you is
by enhancing your skills as a critical thinker. We can identify four kinds of
listening:
Appreciative listening—listening
for pleasure or enjoyment, as when we listen to music, to a comedy routine, or
to an entertaining speech.
Empathic listening—listening
to provide emotional support for the speaker, as when a psychiatrist listens to
a patient or when we lend a sympathetic ear to a friend in distress.
Comprehensive listening—listening
to understand the message of a speaker, as when we attend a classroom lecture
or listen to directions for finding a friend's house.
Critical listening—listening
to evaluate a message for purposes of accepting or rejecting it, as when we
listen to the sales pitch of a car salesperson or the campaign speech of a
political candidate.
Although all four kinds of listening are
important, this chapter deals primarily with comprehensive listening and
critical listening. They are the kinds of listening you will use most often
when listening to speeches in class, when taking lecture notes in other
courses, when communicating at work, and when responding to the barrage of
commercials, political messages, and other persuasive appeals you face every
day. They are also the kinds of listening that are most closely tied to
critical thinking.
As we saw in Chapter 1 (The power of Public Speaking), critical thinking involves a number of skills. Some of those
skills—summarizing information, recalling facts, distinguishing main points
from minor points—are central to comprehensive listening. Other skills of
critical thinking—separating fact from opinion, spotting weaknesses in
reasoning, judging the soundness of evidence—are especially important in
critical listening.
When you engage in comprehensive listening
or critical listening, you must use your mind as well as your ears. When your
mind is not actively involved, you may be hearing, but you are not listening.
In fact, listening and critical thinking are so closely allied that training in
listening is also training in how to think.
At the end of this chapter, we'll discuss
steps you can take to improve your skills in comprehensive and critical
listening. If you follow these steps, you may also become a better critical
thinker…
