1. Understanding the Listening Process
Chapter 6

2. Chapter 6: Listening is our most used communication skill.
A study of people from various occupational backgrounds showed that _70__ percent of their waking time was spent in communication.
Of that time, writing consumed nine percent, reading took up 16 percent, talking about 30 percent and listening occupied 45 percent.

3. Chapter 6: Why learn about listening?
Because we spend so much time listening it is important that we learn to listen well.
Effective listening tends to be the least taught and least understood communication skill.
Listening skills are assumed to develop naturally and, therefore, little attention is given to training individuals to listen effectively.

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Dr. Ralph Nichols conducted tests to see just how effectively most people listen.
His tests revealed that immediately after the average person listens to someone speak, he or she remembers only half of what was said – no matter how carefully the person thought he or she was listening.

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The test further revealed that after eight hours, the average listener tends to forget an additional one-half to one-third of what he or she originally grasped of a speaker’s message.
Remembering only about 25 percent of a test review or a supervisor’s instructions can cause a great deal of trouble in the real world.

6. Chapter 6 Defining listening
A first step toward understanding listening is to realize that listening, like other aspects of communication, is a process.
Listening as a process includes much more than just hearing sounds and understanding language.

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Listening – is a physical and psychological process that involves acquiring, assigning meaning, and responding to symbolic messages from others.
Importance of listening
The primary reason for listening is to acquire oral messages from others.
These message are vital to the way we function in our everyday lives.

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The quality of your friendships depends, in large measure, on your ability to listen well.
A few areas in life that are directly affected by your effectiveness as a listener include:
School – Your ability to participate in class discussions, ask meaningful questions, give relevant answers, carryout detailed homework instructions, and score well on tests relates directly to your ability to listen.

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Relationships - Good listeners tend to be valued as friends because they are perceived as sensitive and caring.
When someone listens closely to the message another is sending, he or she conveys a sense of acknowledgment, concern, and respect for the other person.
Social groups and organizations – Making and acknowledging introductions and asking for and following directions all require special listening skills.

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Listening skills also play a vital role in your ability to participate effectively in social and community organizations.
Your own personal effectiveness and how you are perceived by others in these groups may be influenced by your listening ability.
Public dialogue – Effective listening skills allow you to better understand and remember what you hear, which helps you make better decisions.

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They also help you participate more effectively in public dialogues both as a citizen and a consumer.
The workplace - Listening skills are important to business because they help employees be more productive and create greater profits for the company.
Reports from the Department of Labor as well as from several major corporations all underscore a direct relationship between listening ability, productivity and job performance.

12. Chapter 6: Benefits of effective listening:
Individuals who have reputations as effective listeners tend to build successful relationships.
In school, effective listeners tend to find classes more interesting, become more actively involved, and make better grades.
Employees who are good listeners are usually valued by co- workers, get better jobs, receive more promotions and have more satisfactory work experiences than their coworkers with poor listening skills.

13. Chapter 6: Misconceptions about listening:
As important as listening skills may be, they still tend to be unappreciated and misunderstood.
Misconception: Listening and hearing are the same thing.
Fact: Hearing is the physical first step in the listening process and does not imply understanding.

14. Chapter 6: Misconception: Listening is easy and automatic.
Fact: Listening is a complex process that requires energy, effort and skills.
Misconception: Listening develops naturally.
Fact: Listening consists of learned skills and behaviors that can be learned, relearned, improved and refined.
Misconception: Anyone can listen well if he or she really tries.
Fact: You can exert effort in the listening process, but if you don’t have the needed skills, you may not be able to listen effectively.

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Misconception: The speaker is primarily responsible for the message and for the success of the interaction.
Fact: In effective communication, the speaker and the listener share responsibility. For communication to be successful, listeners may have to compensate for a sender’s lack of ability in transmitting messages.
Misconception: If that’s what I heard, then that’s what you said.
Fact: Listeners cannot assume they have understood messages correctly and should use perception checks to clarify messages.

16. Chapter 6: Misconception: Attitude and listening are unrelated.
Fact: Attitude is a very important factor in listening and retaining information.
Misconception: People remember most of what they hear.
Fact: Listening and memory are related, but failure to remember may or may not indicate faulty listening.

17. Chapter 6: Analyzing the Listening Process:
The invisible, complex phenomenon we know as listening is more than merely hearing sounds or understanding.
Listening is a process that involves making sense of verbal and nonverbal messages.
As a process, listening involves four active steps that build upon one another: acquiring, attending, understanding, responding to messages from others.

18. Chapter 6: Acquiring: The listening process begins with acquiring.
Acquiring is the act of picking up some type of stimulus through the senses.
The first sense involved in listening is hearing.
Hearing – is the physical process of receiving sound.
The outer ear serves as an antenna to aid sound reception; it then picks up sound waves.
These waves are then relayed to the middle ear, where they are amplified and passed to the inner ear.
The inner ear transforms this acoustical energy into electrical impulses and relays the impulses to the brain for processing.
Not everyone can distinguish different sounds, levels of volume, or high and low pitches.

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Visual and auditory messages can conflict, causing listeners to question what they hear.
Despite an individual’s physical ability to hear, when other factors create noise and barriers that keep a person from hearing the message, listening will be blocked in this initial step of the process.
Attending:
You can choose which information to attend to and which you will not.
Attending – is the act of choosing – consciously or subconsciously – to focus your attention on verbal or nonverbal stimuli.
Many people assume that paying attention is automatic.

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If that were the case you would never daydream or allow your mind to wander.
You can learn to play an active role in focusing you attention on a message.
When you decide to attend to a message, you use selective perception.
If you choose not to attend to a message, you may give in to distractions or simply ignore those stimuli.

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Some of the elements that affect your ability to attend effectively include your own needs, interests, attitudes and knowledge at a given time.
Ways of becoming a more attentive listener:
- Evaluate the communication situation by determining what is important and what should be attended.

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- Adjust your attitude to expect the message to be interesting or rewarding.
- Turn off other thoughts and focus your energy on the sender’s message.
- Determine what you have to gain from focusing your attention and listening.
- Ignore outside distractions.
- Bring your attention back to the speaker when you realize that your mind is wandering.
- Stay focused and maintain your concentration.

23. Chapter 6: Understanding:
You generally listen because you want to comprehend what others are saying, form relationships, and build mutual trust and understanding.
Understanding – is a complex mental process that involves decoding the symbolic messages received from others and then interpreting and assigning a personal meaning to that message.
To understand what someone says, you must first decode it.
Decoding was defined as a listener’s assigning meaning to a sender’s words and nonverbal cues.
Decoding involves listening carefully to a speaker’s words to try to understand the meaning the speaker intends to convey. Next, you interpret or filter the message based on your own experiences.

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Decoding is essential to effective listening because without it you cannot understand the language of the speaker.
Factors such as knowledge, culture and language skills affect your ability to decode messages.
It can be extremely difficult to understand a concept if you don’t know the meaning of the terms used to describe it.

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The receiver also has to interpret the meanings or feelings the speaker is expressing.
Interpreting – is a process in which you personalize the sender’s message to determine meaning for you.
It relates to the process of perception, or self-talk, in which you tell yourself what the speaker is saying.

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Your knowledge or lack of knowledge, attitudes, values and needs, culture, language, beliefs, biases, prejudices, expectations, and self-concept all are important elements that influence your personal interpretation of a sender’s message.
You can be reasonably sure that it is unlikely that any two people will interpret a particular message in exactly the same way.
Words symbols used by speakers are inexact and depend on the context in which they are given.

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Responding:
After arriving at you own understanding about communication, you can respond to it.
Responding – is the listener’s internal emotional and intellectual reaction to a message.

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The verbal and nonverbal feedback is the listener’s external response to the message.
- You first respond emotionally to the message.
- You then determine how you feel about the message.
- You evaluate and analyze your response to the message.
- You encode choices about what to say or do in response to your understanding of the message and your reaction to it.

29. Chapter 6: Communication strategies for improving responding skills:
- Monitor, analyze, and evaluate your emotional and intellectual reaction.
- Consider possible alternative reactions.
- Consider basic standards of appropriateness and balance the rewards and consequences of alternative responses.

30. Chapter 6: - Take responsibility for your chosen response.
- Consider all responses before giving feedback.
- Adapt and adjust you messages according to the feedback you receive.
- Choose words that are clear to the listener.

31. Chapter 6: Providing feedback:
Feedback is one person’s observable response to a message.
A speaker generally cannot be certain that oral communication has occurred until he or she receives some kind of observable feedback from the listener.
As an effective listener, you have the responsibility to provide appropriate feedback.
Feedback gives the speaker some idea about whether or not the message was received and in what manner is was processed.

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Finally, feedback also gives the speaker clues about how the listener decoded, interpreted, and reacted to the message the speaker sent.
Factor That Affect the Listening Process:
The listening process is influenced by three key factors: noise, barriers, and memory
Noise:
The first critical factor that affects listening process is noise – the internal and external distractions that interfere with listening and concentration.
Noise can exist in every step of the listening process—hearing, acquiring, attending, and responding.

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Internal noise such as confusion, impatience, or annoyance may drown out valuable incoming messages.
External noise can distract you and keep you from fully understanding a message.
Barriers:
Barriers to the listening process can prevent or block effective communication.

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Speech problems, incompatible language, and reduced hearing ability are some of the external barriers that block message reception.
External barriers tend to be harder to eliminate than noise because they involve more complex or long-term problems.

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Internal barriers often result from ignorance, intolerance, fear or traumatic experiences.
- They tend to be deeply rooted attitudes, biases, prejudices, and beliefs that interfere with listening.
Memory:
Memory – the process of retaining or recalling information, affects all aspects of the listening process.

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Without memory, there would be no knowledge and no learning.
Like other aspects of listening, memory can be selective.
Communication strategies for improving memory skills:
- Concentrate on each message as you are receiving it.

37. Chapter 6: Three types of memory:
- Use calendars, list or notes as reminders.
- Summarize, rehearse, repeat, or write information to seal it in your memory.
- Form mental associations and organize elements of information into related memory clusters.
- Try to learn new information in small portions rather that all at once, as in cramming for a test.
Three types of memory:
Immediate memory – Recalling information for a brief period of time.
Short term – Recalling information for carrying out a routine of daily task.
Long term – Recalling information from past experience.

38. Chapter 6: Developing Listening Skills Characteristics of listening:
The way that you listen varies according to the context and what you want to get out of the communication.
You can listen three ways: Active listening; passively listening, or impatiently listening
Active listening – is when the listener participates fully in the communication process.
- When you listen attentively, provide feedback, and strive to understand and remember messages.
- Generally active listeners expect listening to be rewarding and enjoyable.

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Passive listening – is when the listener does not actively participate in the interactions.
- Passive listeners think they can absorb information even when they do not contribute to the interaction.
- Passive listening is sometimes called “lazy” listening.
- Passive listeners view the communication context as a one-way process and place the responsibility for successful communication on the speaker.
Impatient listening – is when short bursts of active listening are interrupted by noise and other distractions.
Types of impatient listening:
Anticipatory listening – Listener anticipates what the speaker will say and then rushes ahead in his or her mind to plan a response.

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Defensive listening – Listener’s main goal in listening is to argue or disagree.
Combative listening – Listener’s main goal in listening is to “win” or to put down a speaker.
Distracted listening - Listener pays attention to the first part of a statement , assumes what the speaker will continue to say , then stops listening and starts thinking about something else.

41. Chapter 6: Four major types of listening:
Critical listening – is listening to comprehend ideas and information in order to achieve a specific purpose or goal.
- It is sometimes referred to as “comprehensive listening” because your reason for listening is to comprehend or understand the sender’s message.
Deliberative listening – is listening to understand, analyze, and evaluate messages so you can accept or reject a point of view, make a decision, or take action.
- You use deliberative when receiving and evaluating persuasive messages.
- Listening to persuasive messages requires the listener to evaluate the message and deliberate, or think over, the position or action he or she is being asked to take.

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Empathic listening - is listening to understand, participate in, and enhance the relationship.
- The goal of empathic listening is to develop understanding and appreciation of the feelings and meanings expressed by a message sender.
- When you listen empathically, you try to put yourself in another person’s place or see the world through their eyes.
Appreciative listening – is listening to enjoy, or appreciate, a speaker’s message or a performance on an artistic level.
- You use appreciative listening when you attend movies or watch television, listen to music, or go to a theater to watch a play.
- The main goal of appreciative listening is enjoyment.