The Importance of Listening
Listening is an active process by which we make sense of, assess, and respond to what we hear.
Learning Objectives
Define active listening and list the five stages of the listening process
Key Takeaways
Key Points
- The listening process involves five stages: receiving, understanding, evaluating, remembering, and responding.
- Active listening is a particular communication technique that requires the listener to provide feedback on what he or she hears to the speaker.
- Three main degrees of active listening are repeating, paraphrasing, and reflecting.
Key Terms
- Listening: The active process by which we make sense of, assess, and respond to what we hear.
- active listening: A particular communication technique that requires the listener to provide feedback on what he or she hears to the speaker.
Listening Is More than Just Hearing
Learning to Listen: Antony Gormley’s statue “Untitled [Listening],” Maygrove Peace Park
Listening is a skill of critical significance in all aspects of our lives–from maintaining our personal relationships, to getting our jobs done, to taking notes in class, to figuring out which bus to take to the airport. Regardless of how we’re engaged with listening, it’s important to understand that listening involves more than just hearing the words that are directed at us. Listening is an active process by which we make sense of, assess, and respond to what we hear.
The listening process involves five stages: receiving, understanding, evaluating, remembering, and responding. These stages will be discussed in more detail in later sections. Basically, an effective listener must hear and identify the speech sounds directed toward them, understand the message of those sounds, critically evaluate or assess that message, remember what’s been said, and respond [either verbally or nonverbally] to information they’ve received.
Effectively engaging with all five stages of the listening process lets us best gather the information we need from the world around us.
Active Listening
Active listening is a particular communication technique that requires the listener to provide feedback on what he or she hears to the speaker, by way of restating or paraphrasing what they have heard in their own words. The goal of this repetition is to confirm what the listener has heard and to confirm the understanding of both parties. The ability to actively listen demonstrates sincerity, and that nothing is being assumed or taken for granted. Active listening is most often used to improve personal relationships, reduce misunderstanding and conflicts, strengthen cooperation, and foster understanding.
When engaging with a particular speaker, a listener can use several degrees of active listening, each resulting in a different quality of communication with the speaker. This active listening chart shows three main degrees of listening: repeating, paraphrasing, and reflecting.
Degrees of Active Listening: There are several degrees of active listening.
Active listening can also involve paying attention to the speaker’s behavior and body language. Having the ability to interpret a person’s body language lets the listener develop a more accurate understanding of the speaker’s message.
The Receiving Stage
The first stage of the listening process is the receiving stage, which involves hearing and attending.
Learning Objectives
Define the receiving stage of the listening process
Key Takeaways
Key Points
- Hearing is the physiological process of registering sound waves as they hit the eardrum.
- Attending is the process of accurately identifying particular sounds we hear as words.
- Attending also involves being able to discern breaks between words, or speech segmentation.
Key Terms
- Hearing: The physiological process of registering sound waves as they hit the eardrum.
- Attending: The process of accurately identifying particular sounds as words.
- Receiving stage: The first stage of the listening process, which involves hearing and attending.
The Receiving Stage
The first stage of the listening process is the receiving stage, which involves hearing and attending.
Use Your Ears!: The first stage of the listening process is receiving.
Hearing is the physiological process of registering sound waves as they hit the eardrum. As obvious as it may seem, in order to effectively gather information through listening, we must first be able to physically hear what we’re listening to. The clearer the sound, the easier the listening process becomes.
Paired with hearing, attending is the other half of the receiving stage in the listening process. Attending is the process of accurately identifying and interpreting particular sounds we hear as words. The sounds we hear have no meaning until we give them their meaning in context. Listening is an active process that constructs meaning from both verbal and nonverbal messages.
The Challenges of Reception
Listeners are often bombarded with a variety of auditory stimuli all at once, so they must differentiate which of those stimuli are speech sounds and which are not. Effective listening involves being able to focus in on speech sounds while disregarding other noise. For instance, a train passenger that hears the captain’s voice over the loudspeaker understands that the captain is speaking, then deciphers what the captain is saying despite other voices in the cabin. Another example is trying to listen to a friend tell a story while walking down a busy street. In order to best listen to what she’s saying, the listener needs to ignore the ambient street sounds.
Attending also involves being able to discern human speech, also known as “speech segmentation. “1 Identifying auditory stimuli as speech but not being able to break those speech sounds down into sentences and words would be a failure of the listening process. Discerning speech segmentation can be a more difficult activity when the listener is faced with an unfamiliar language.
Effective Listening Skills
Most of what we do in the Writing Center is listen, but there’s a difference between hearing and understanding the words someone is saying and listening to their message. Listening to your writers and your coworkers is vital to maintaining good conversation and avoiding misunderstandings that might lead to unnecessary conflict.
4.4 Stages of Listening
Learning Objectives
- Explain the receiving stage of listening.
- Explain the understanding stage of listening.
- Explain the remembering stage of listening.
- Explain the evaluating stage of listening.
- Explain the responding stage of listening.
- Understand the two types of feedback listeners give to speakers.
Figure 4.3 Stages of Feedback
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. Notice in Figure 4.3 “Stages of Feedback” that this stage is represented by the ear because it is the primary tool involved with this stage of the listening process.
One of the authors of this book recalls attending a political rally for a presidential candidate at which about five thousand people were crowded into an outdoor amphitheater. When the candidate finally started speaking, the cheering and yelling was so loud that the candidate couldn’t be heard easily despite using a speaker system. In this example, our coauthor had difficulty receiving the message because of the external noise. This is only one example of the ways that hearing alone can require sincere effort, but you must hear the message before you can continue the process of listening.
Receiving
Before we can engage other steps in the listening process, we must take in stimuli through our senses. In any given communication encounter, it is likely that we will return to the receiving stage many times as we process incoming feedback and new messages. This part of the listening process is more physiological than other parts, which include cognitive and relational elements. We primarily take in information needed for listening through auditory and visual channels. Although we don’t 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 interferes 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 interfere primarily with the cognitive processes of listening. We can enhance our ability to receive, and in turn listen, by trying to minimize noise.
Julian Treasure gives us 5 Ways to Listen Better in his TedTalk below.
The listening process
Listeningis the learned process of receiving, interpreting, recalling, evaluating, and responding to verbal and nonverbal messages. Because it is a process, it doesn’t have a defined start and finish. Like the communication process, listening has cognitive, behavioural, and relational elements and doesn’t unfold in a linear, step-by-step fashion. Models of processes are informative in that they help us visualize specific components, but keep in mind that they do not capture the speed, overlapping nature, or overall complexity of the actual process in action. The stages of the listening process are receiving, interpreting, recalling, evaluating, and responding.
Receiving
Before we can engage other steps in the listening process, we must take in stimuli through our senses. We primarily take in information needed for listening through auditory and visual channels. Although we don’t 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 email, text, and phone interactions presents some difficulties for reading contextual clues into meaning received through only auditory channels.
Interpreting
During the interpreting stage of listening, we combine the visual and auditory information we receive and try to make meaning out of that information. It is through the interpreting stage that we may begin to understand the stimuli we have received. When we understand something, we are able to attach meaning by connecting information to previous experiences.
Recalling
Our ability to recall information is dependent on some of the physiological limits of how memory works. As stimuli are organized and interpreted, they make their way to short-term memory where they either expire and are forgotten or are transferred to long-term memory.Recall is an important part of the listening process because it is most often used to assess listening abilities and effectiveness.
Evaluating
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.
Responding
Responding entails sending verbal and nonverbal messages that indicate attentiveness and understanding or a lack thereof.We send verbal and nonverbal feedback while another person is talking and after they are done.Back-channel cuesare the verbal and nonverbal signals we send while someone is talking and can consist of verbal cues like “uh-huh,” “oh,” and “right,” and/or nonverbal cues like direct eye contact, head nods, and leaning forward. Back-channel cues are generally a form of positive feedback that indicates others are actively listening. People also send cues intentionally and unintentionally that indicate they aren’t listening. If another person is looking away, fidgeting, texting, or turned away, we will likely interpret those responses negatively.
Paraphrasing is a responding behavior that can also show that you understand what was communicated. When youparaphraseinformation, you rephrase the message into your own words. For example, you might say the following to start off a paraphrased response: “What I heard you say was…” or “It seems like you’re saying…” You can also ask clarifying questions to get more information. It is often a good idea to pair a paraphrase with a question to keep a conversation flowing. For example, you might pose the following paraphrase and question pair: “It seems like you believe you were treated unfairly. Is that right?” Or you might ask a standalone question like “What did your colleague do that made you think they were ‘playing favourites?’” Make sure to paraphrase and/or ask questions once a person’s turn is over because interrupting can also be interpreted as a sign of not listening.