Art of Listening

• Listening is the beginning of understanding. All positive human relationships begin with effective listening. It is about effectively absorbing the speaker's message and showing that you are interested in the information being shared. In doing so, you also give feedback or reactions to what is being shared through verbal and nonverbal communication.
• Communication breakdowns are often caused by misunderstandings, which are rooted in ineffective listening. Even though there are noise and barriers, if you truly want to listen, you will find ways to overcome them, as achieving effective communication begins with effective listening. Listening involves a lot of skills, depending on the purpose of listening and the types of listening.
• When the sound enters our ears, this has to do with the physical process of perceiving it; this is hearing. However, when the sounds being heard are processed mentally, which obviously requires effort and focus, this becomes listening.
• The process of listening entails focus, concentration, and engagement. Thus, it is an active process that involves the ears and all other senses.
• When one is fully involved, they are in a state of "active listening." Here, the speaker can sense that the person listening is engaged by observing nonverbal cues such as nodding the head, smiling, and maintaining eye contact. These are essential parts of feedback.
• Listening is the first language skill learned or mastered before somebody learns speaking, reading, and writing.
• Sevik (2012, p.328) states that listening is the fundamental skill that must be learned in the language learning process.
• Listening is very important in language learning because it provides input for students and has a vital role in developing students’ language knowledge (Rost, 1994). If students cannot understand the input, the learning process cannot begin.
• Listening is an active process by which we make sense of, assess, and respond to what we hear.
• 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.
• The listening process involves five stages: receiving, understanding, evaluating, remembering, and responding.
• Fill in the Blank

  A) Receiving

  B) Understanding

  C) Evaluating

  D) Remembering

  E) Responding

  
• 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 ensure understanding on both sides.
• The ability to actively listen demonstrates sincerity, showing that nothing is being assumed or taken for granted.
• Active listening is most often used to improve personal relationships, reduce misunderstandings 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.
• Three main degrees of listening: repeating, paraphrasing, and reflecting.
• 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 allows the listener to develop a more accurate understanding of the speaker’s message.
• Repeating

  • Perceiving
  • Paying Attention
  • Remembering
  • Repeating the message using exactly the same words used by the speaker
• Paraphrasing

  • Perceiving
  • Paying Attention
  • Remembering
  • Thinking and Reasoning
  • Rendering the message using similar words and similar phrase arrangement to the ones used by the speaker
• Reflecting

  • Perceiving
  • Paying Attention
  • Remembering
  • Thinking and Reasoning
  • Rendering the message using your own words and sentence structure
• Stages of Listening Process:

  • The Receiving Stage
  • The Understanding Stage
  • The Evaluating Stage
  • The Remembering Stage
  • The Responding Stage
• The first stage of the listening process is the receiving stage, which involves hearing and attending.
• Hearing is the physiological process of registering sound waves as they hit the eardrum. As obvious as it may seem, 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 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.
• 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 on speech sounds while disregarding other noise.
• Attending also involves being able to discern (perceive or recognize) humanspeech, also known as “speech segmentation."
• The second stage in the listening process is the understanding stage.
• Understanding or comprehension occurs when both the speaker and audience share an experience of meaning and constitutes the first step in the listening process.
• The understanding stage during which the audience determines the context and meanings of the words they hear. Determining the context and meaning of individual words, as well as assigning meaning in language, is essential to understanding sentences, and, thus, both are essential to understanding a speaker’s message.
• Once the listener understands the speaker’s main point, they can begin to sort out the rest of the information they are hearing and decide where it belongs in their mental outline.
• Understanding what we hear is a huge part of our everyday lives, particularly in terms of gathering basic information.
• One tactic for better understanding a speaker’s meaning is to ask questions.
• Asking questions allows the listener to fill in any holes he or she may have in the mental reconstruction of the speaker’s message.
• The Evaluating Stage

  • This stage of the listening process is the one during which the listener assesses the information they received, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Evaluating allows the listener to form an opinion of what they heard and, if necessary, to begin developing a response.
• During the evaluating stage, the listener determines whether the information they heard and understood from the speaker is well constructed or disorganized, biased or unbiased, true or false, significant or insignificant. They also ascertain how and why the speaker has produced and conveyed the message that they delivered. This process may involve considerations of a speaker’s personal or professional motivations and goals.
• The evaluating stage occurs most effectively once the listener fully understands what the speaker is trying to say.
• The Evaluating Stage

  • This stage of critical analysis is important for a listener in terms of how what they heard will affect their own ideas, decisions, actions, and/or beliefs.
• In the listening process, the remembering stage occurs as the audience categorizes and retains the information they’ve gathered from the speaker for future access.