LECTURE SESSION FIVE

LISTENING SKILLS
Lecture Outline
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Learning Outcomes
5.3 Definition
5.4 Types of listening
5.5 Importance of listening
5.6 Stages of listening
5.7 Listening styles
5.8 Summary
5.9 Review Activity
5.10 References and Further Reading

5.1. Introduction
Hello and welcome to the lecture on listening skills. Listening is a primary means
through which we learn new information, which can help us meet instrumental
needs as we learn things that help us to complete specific tasks at work or school
and get things done in general. The act of listening to our relational partners
provides support, which is an essential part of relational maintenance and helps
us meet our relational needs

5.2 Learning Outcomes

At the end of this lecture, you should be able to:
1. Describe the stages of the listening process
2. Discuss the four main types of listening
3. Compare and contrast the four main listening styles

5.3. Definition
Let us start our discussion by asking ourselves this question.
 In text Question 1: What do you understand by listening skills?

Good.
Listening is the learned process of receiving, interpreting, recalling, evaluating,
and responding to verbal and nonverbal messages. We begin to engage with the
listening process long before we engage in any recognizable verbal or nonverbal
communication. It is only after listening for months as infants that we begin to
practice our own forms of expression consciously. In this lecture, we will learn
more about each stage of the listening process, the main types of listening, and
the main listening styles.

5.4. Listening Styles

Now let’s discuss the types/styles of listening.

Listening serves many purposes, and different situations require different types
of listening. The type of listening we engage in affects our communication and
how others respond to us. For example, when we listen to empathize with others,
our communication will likely be supportive and open, which will then lead the
other person to feel “heard” and supported and hopefully view the interaction
positively. The main types of listening we will discuss are discriminative,
informational, critical, and empathetic.

5.4.1. Discriminative Listening

Discriminative listening is a focused and usually instrumental type of listening
that is primarily physiological and occurs mostly at the receiving stage of the
listening process. Here we engage in listening to scan and monitor our
surroundings to isolate particular auditory or visual stimuli. For example, we
may focus our listening on a dark part of the yard while walking the dog at night
to determine if the noise we just heard presents us with any danger. Or we may
look for a particular nonverbal cue to let us know our conversational partner
received our message.

In the absence of hearing impairment, we have an innate and physiological

ability to engage in discriminative listening. Although this is the most basic form
of listening, it provides the foundation on which more intentional listening skills
are built. This type of listening can be refined and honed. Think of how
musicians, singers, and mechanics exercise specialized discriminative listening to
isolate specific aural stimuli and how actors, detectives, and sculptors
discriminate visual cues that allow them to analyze, make meaning from, or
recreate nuanced behaviour.

5.4.2. Informational Listening

Informational listening entails listening to comprehend and retain information.
This type of listening is not evaluative and is common in teaching and learning
contexts ranging from a student listening to an informative speech to an out-of-
towner listening to directions to the nearest gas station. We also use
informational listening when we listen to news reports, voice mail, and briefings
at work. Since retention and recall are important components of informational
listening, good concentration and memory skills are key. These also happen to be
skills that many college students struggle with, at least in the first years of
college, but will be expected to have mastered once they get into professional
contexts. In many professional contexts, informational listening is important,
especially when receiving instructions. I caution my students that they will be
expected to process verbal instructions more frequently in their profession than
they are in college. Most college professors provide detailed instructions and
handouts with assignments so students can review them as needed, but many
supervisors and managers will expect you to take the initiative to remember or
record vital information. Additionally, many bosses are not as open to questions
or requests to repeat themselves as professors are.

5.4.2. Critical Listening

Critical listening entails listening to analyze or evaluate a message based on
information presented verbally and information that can be inferred from
context. A critical listener evaluates a message and accepts it, rejects it, or decides
to withhold judgment and seek more information. As constant consumers of
messages, we need to be able to assess the credibility of speakers and their
messages and identify various persuasive appeals and faulty logic (known as
fallacies). Critical listening is important during persuasive exchanges.

5.4.3. Empathetic Listening

Empathetic listening is the most challenging form of listening and occurs when
we try to understand or experience what a speaker is thinking or feeling.
Empathetic listening is distinct from sympathetic listening. While the word
empathy means to “feel into” or “feel with” another person, sympathy means to
“feel for” someone. Sympathy is generally more self-oriented and distant than
empathy. Empathetic listening is other-oriented and should be genuine. Because
of our centrality in our perceptual world, empathetic listening can be difficult.
It’s often much easier for us to tell our own story or to give advice than it is to
really listen to and empathize with someone else. We should keep in mind that
sometimes others just need to be heard and our feedback isn’t actually desired.

Empathetic listening is key for dialogue and helps maintain interpersonal

relationships. To reach dialogue, people must have a degree of open-mindedness
and a commitment to civility that allows them to be empathetic while still
allowing them to believe in and advocate for their own position. An excellent
example of critical and empathetic listening in action is the international Truth
and Reconciliation movement. The most well-known example of a Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (TRC) occurred in South Africa as a way to address
the various conflicts that occurred during apartheid. The goal of such
commissions is to allow people to tell their stories, share their perspectives in an
open environment, and be listened to.

The truth and reconciliation process seeks to heal relations between opposing
sides by uncovering all pertinent facts, distinguishing truth from lies, and
allowing for acknowledgement, appropriate public mourning, forgiveness and
healing…The focus often is on giving victims, witnesses and even perpetrators a
chance to publicly tell their stories without fear of prosecution.

5.5. Importance of Listening

Understanding how listening works provide the foundation we need to explore
why we listen, including various types and styles of listening. In general,
listening helps us to achieve all the communication goals (physical, instrumental,
relational, and identity) that we learned in our introduction to Communication
Skills.

Listening is important in academic, professional, and personal contexts. In terms

of academics, poor listening skills have been shown to contribute significantly to
failure in the majority of student's academic performance at college. In general,
students with high scores for listening ability have greater academic
achievement. Poor listening skills, lack of conciseness, and inability to give
constructive feedback have been identified as potential communication
challenges in both professional and academic.

The main purposes of listening include:

a) to focus on messages sent by other people or noises coming from our
surroundings;
 b) to better our understanding of other people’s communication;
c) to critically evaluate other people’s messages;
d) to monitor nonverbal signals;
e) to indicate that we are interested or paying attention;
f) to empathize with others and show we care for them (relational maintenance);
and
g) to engage in negotiation, dialogue, or other exchanges that result in a shared
understanding of or agreement on an issue.

In text Question 1: What are the stages of listening?

Good
The listening process is divided into five stages
5.6. Stages of Listening
Author Joseph DeVito has divided the listening process into five stages:
receiving, understanding, remembering, evaluating, and responding (DeVito,
2000).

5.6.1. Receiving
Receiving is the intentional focus on hearing a speaker’s message, which happens
when we filter out other sources so that we can isolate the message and avoid the
confusing mixture of incoming stimuli. At this stage, we are still only hearing the
message.

Although we do not often think about visual cues as a part of listening, they
influence how we interpret messages. For example, seeing a person’s face when
we hear their voice allows us to take in nonverbal cues from facial expressions
and eye contact. The fact that these visual cues are missing in e-mail, text, and
phone interactions presents some difficulties for reading contextual clues into
meaning received through only auditory channels. It is important to consider
noise as a factor that influences how we receive messages. Some noise interferes
primarily with hearing, which is the physical process of receiving stimuli
through internal and external components of the ears and eyes, and some
interfere with listening, which is the cognitive process of processing the stimuli
taken in during hearing. While hearing leads to listening; they are not the same
thing.

Environmental noise such as other people talking, the sounds of traffic, and
music interfere with the physiological aspects of hearing. Psychological noise like
stress and anger interferes primarily with the cognitive processes of listening. We
can enhance our ability to receive, and in turn, listen, by trying to minimize
noise.

5.6.2. Understanding
In the understanding stage, we attempt to learn the meaning of the message,
which is not always easy. For one thing, if a speaker does not enunciate clearly, it
may be difficult to tell what the message was. Even when we have understood
the words in a message, because of the differences in our backgrounds and
experience, we sometimes make the mistake of attaching our meanings to the
words of others.
5.6.3. Remembering
Remembering begins with listening; if you can’t remember something that was
said, you might not have been listening effectively. The most common reason for
not remembering a message after the fact is because it wasn’t learned in the first
place. However, even when you are listening attentively, some messages are
more difficult than others to understand and remember. Highly complex
messages that are filled with detail call for highly developed listening skills.
Moreover, if something distracts your attention even for a moment, you could
miss out on information that explains other new concepts you hear when you
begin to listen fully again. Finally, if understanding has been inaccurate, the
recollection of the message will be inaccurate too.

5.6.4. Evaluating
The fourth stage in the listening process is evaluating or judging the value of the
message. We might be thinking, “This makes sense” or, conversely, “This is very
odd.” Because everyone embodies biases and perspectives learned from widely
diverse sets of life experiences, evaluations of the same message can vary widely
from one listener to another. Even the most open-minded listeners will have
opinions of a speaker, and those opinions will influence how the message is
evaluated. People are more likely to evaluate a message positively if the speaker
speaks clearly, presents ideas logically, and gives reasons to support the points
made.

When we evaluate something, we make judgments about its credibility,

completeness, and worth. In terms of credibility, we try to determine the degree
to which we believe a speaker’s statements are correct and/or true. In terms of
completeness, we try to “read between the lines” and evaluate the message in
relation to what we know about the topic or situation being discussed. We
evaluate the worth of a message by making a value judgment about whether we
think the message or idea is good/bad, right/wrong, or desirable/undesirable.
All these aspects of evaluating require critical thinking skills, which we aren’t
born with but must develop over time through our own personal and intellectual
development.

Unfortunately, personal opinions sometimes result in prejudiced evaluations.

Imagine you’re listening to a speech given by someone from another country and
this person has an accent that is hard to understand. You may have a hard time
simply making out the speaker’s message. Some people find a foreign accent to
be interesting or even exotic, while others find it annoying or even take it as a
sign of ignorance. If a listener has a strong bias against foreign accents, the
listener may not even attempt to attend to the message. If you mistrust a speaker
because of an accent, you could be rejecting important or personally enriching
information. Good listeners have learned to refrain from making these
judgments and instead to focus on the speaker’s meanings.

5.6.5. Responding
Responding—sometimes referred to as feedback—is the fifth and final stage of
the listening process. It’s the stage at which you indicate your involvement.
Almost anything you do at this stage can be interpreted as feedback. For
example, you are giving positive feedback to your lecturer at the end of a lecture
if you stay behind to finish a sentence in your notes or approach the lecturer to
ask for clarification. The opposite kind of feedback is given by students who
gather their belongings and rush out the door as soon as a class is over. Notice in
Fig.6 this stage is represented by the lips because we often give feedback in the
form of verbal feedback; however, you can just as easily respond nonverbally.

5.6.6. Formative Feedback

Not all response occurs at the end of the message. Formative feedback is a
natural part of the ongoing transaction between a speaker and a listener. As the
speaker delivers the message, a listener signals his or her involvement with
focused attention, note-taking, nodding, and other behaviors that indicate
understanding or failure to understand the message. These signals are important
to the speaker, who is interested in whether the message is clear and accepted or
whether the content of the message is meeting the resistance of preconceived
ideas. Speakers can use this feedback to decide whether additional examples,
support materials, or explanation is needed.
5.6.6. Summative Feedback
Summative feedback is given at the end of the communication. When you attend
a political rally, a presentation given by a speaker you admire, or even a class,
there are verbal and nonverbal ways of indicating your appreciation for or your
disagreement with the messages of the speakers at the end of the message.
Maybe you’ll stand up and applaud a speaker you agreed with or just sit staring
in silence after listening to a speaker you didn’t like. In other cases, a speaker
may be attempting to persuade you to donate to a charity, so if the speaker
passes a bucket and you make a donation, you are providing feedback on the
speaker’s effectiveness. At the same time, we do not always listen most carefully
to the messages of speakers we admire. Sometimes we simply enjoy being in
their presence, and our summative feedback is not about the message but our
attitudes about the speaker. If your feedback is limited to something like, “I just
love your voice,” you might be indicating that you did not listen carefully to the
content of the message.
There is little doubt that by now, you are beginning to understand the
complexity of listening and the great potential for errors. By becoming aware of
what is involved with active listening and where difficulties might lie, you can
prepare yourself both as a listener and as a speaker to minimize listening errors
with your public speeches.

In text Question 1: Highlight the different listening styles?

5.7. Listening Styles

Just as there are different types of listening, there are also different styles of
listening. People may be categorized as one or more of the following listeners:
people-oriented, action-oriented, content-oriented, and time-oriented listeners.
Research finds that 40 per cent of people have more than one preferred listening
style and that they choose a style based on the listening situation. Other research
finds that people often still revert to a single preferred style in times of emotional
or cognitive stress, even if they know a different style of listening would be
better. Below is a brief overview of each listening style, we will explore some of
their applications, strengths, and weaknesses.

5.7.1. People Oriented Listeners

People-oriented listeners are concerned about the emotional states of others and
listen to offer support in interpersonal relationships. People-oriented listeners
can be characterized as “supporters” who are caring and understanding. These
listeners are sought out because they are known as people who will “lend an
ear.” They may or may not be valued for the advice they give, but all people
often want is a good listener. This type of listening may be especially valuable in
interpersonal communication involving emotional exchanges, as a person-
oriented listener can create a space where people can make themselves
vulnerable without fear of being cut off or judged. People-oriented listeners are
likely skilled empathetic listeners and may find success in supportive fields like
counselling, social work, or nursing. Interestingly, such fields are typically
feminized, in that people often associate the characteristics of people-oriented
listeners with roles filled by women.

5.7.2. Action-Oriented Listeners

Action-oriented listeners focus on what action needs to take place in regards to a
received message and try to formulate an organized way to initiate that action.
These listeners are frustrated by disorganization because it detracts from the
possibility of actually doing something. Action-oriented listeners can be thought
of as “builders”—like an engineer, a construction site foreperson, or a skilled
project manager. This style of listening can be very effective when a task needs to
be completed under time, budgetary, or other logistical constraints. One research
study found that people prefer an action-oriented style of listening in
instructional contexts.

5.7.3. Content-Oriented Listeners

Content-oriented listeners like to listen to complex information and evaluate the
content of a message, often from multiple perspectives, before concluding. These
listeners can be thought of as “learners,” and they also ask questions to solicit
more information to fill out their understanding of an issue. Content-oriented
listeners often enjoy high perceived credibility because of their thorough,
balanced, and objective approach to engaging with information. Content
oriented listeners are likely skilled informational and critical listeners and may
find success in academic careers in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences.
Ideally, judges and politicians would also possess these characteristics.

5.7.4. Time-Oriented Listeners

Time-oriented listeners are more concerned about time limits and timelines than
they are with the content or senders of a message. These listeners can be thought
of as “executives,” and they tend to verbalize the time constraints under which
they are operating.

For example, a time-oriented supervisor may say the following to an employee

who has just entered his office and asked to talk: “Sure, I can talk, but I only have
about five minutes.” These listeners may also exhibit nonverbal cues that indicate
time and/or attention shortages, such as looking at a clock, avoiding eye contact,
or nonverbally trying to close down an interaction. Time-oriented listeners are
also more likely to interrupt others, which may make them seem insensitive to
emotional/personal needs. People often get action-oriented and time-oriented
listeners confused.
Action-oriented listeners would be happy to get to a conclusion or decision
quickly if they perceive that they are acting on well-organized and accurate
information. They would, however, not mind taking longer to reach a conclusion
when dealing with a complex topic, and they would delay deciding if the
information presented to them didn’t meet their standards of an organization.
Unlike time-oriented listeners, action-oriented listeners are not as likely to cut
people off (especially if people are presenting relevant information) and are not
as likely to take shortcuts.
5.8. Summary
Listening is the process of receiving, interpreting, recalling,
evaluating, and responding to verbal and nonverbal messages. In
the receiving stage, we select and attend to various stimuli based
on salience. We then interpret auditory and visual stimuli to make
meaning out of them based on our existing schemata. Short-term
and long-term memory store stimuli until they are discarded or
processed for later recall. We then evaluate the credibility,
completeness, and worth of a message before responding with
verbal and nonverbal signals.
You can improve listening competence at the receiving stage by
preparing yourself to listen and distinguishing between
intentional messages and noise; at the interpreting stage by
identifying main points and supporting points and considering
multiple contexts; at the recalling stage by creating memories
using multiple senses and repeating, rephrasing, and reorganizing
messages to fit cognitive preferences; at the evaluating stage by
separating facts from inferences and assessing the credibility of
the speaker’s message; and at the responding stage by asking
appropriate questions, offering paraphrased messages, and
adapting your response to the speaker and the situation.
Active listening is the process of pairing outwardly visible positive
listening behaviour with positive cognitive listening practices and
is characterized by mentally preparing yourself to listen, working
to maintain focus on concentration, using appropriate verbal and
nonverbal back-channel cues to signal attentiveness, and engaging
in strategies like note-taking and mentally reorganizing
information to help with recall.

5.9. Review Activity

1. Which style of listening best describes you and why? Which style
do you have the most difficulty with or like the least and why?
2. The recalling stage of the listening process is a place where many
people experience difficulties. What techniques do you use or
could you use to improve your recall of certain information?
3. Discuss and analyze the listening environment of a place you
have worked or an organization with which you were involved.
Overall, was it positive or negative? What were the norms and
expectations for effective listening that contributed to the
listening environment? Who helped set the tone for the listening
environment?

5.10. References and Further Reading

1. Bonet, Diana. The Business of Listening: Third Edition.
New Delhi: Viva Books, 2004.
2. Hargie, Owen. Ed. The Handbook of Communication Skills:
Third Edition. London: Routledge, 1986.
3. Kratz, Abby Robinson. Effective Listening Skills. Toronto: ON:
4. Nelson, Paul E. & Judy C. Pearson, Confidence in
 Public S p e a k i n g , London: Oxford University Press,
2004.
5. Steil, Lyman K., et al. Effective Listening: Key to
Your Success. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-
Wesley Publishing Company, 1983.
6. Bonet, Diana. The Business of Listening: Third
Edition. New Delhi: Viva Books, 2004.
7. Kratz, Abby Robinson. Effective Listening Skills.
Toronto: ON: Irwin Professional Publishing, 1995
8. Nelson, Paul E. & Judy C. Pearson, Confidence in
Public Speaking. London: Oxford University Press,
2004.