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The Art of Listening

Listening is the active process of receiving audio message, constructing meaning from it and responding to both verbal and non-verbal communications.

Definitions

Oxford dictionary defines listening as paying attention to somebody or something that you can hear.

Listening is the interpretative action taken by someone in order to understand and potentially make meaningful response to the message heard. (Roland Bathes)

Listening is the active process of receiving audio stimuli (De Vito, 1987).

Definition: Listening is a voluntary process that goes beyond simply reacting to sounds but includes understanding, analysing, evaluating and responding to audio messages.

Listening is an active deliberate, selective process by which a message is received, critically interpreted and acted upon by a purposeful listener.

There is always a big difference between hearing and listening. We should never mistaken between the two. It is possible to hear without listening but you cannot listen without hearing.

Oxford dictionary describes hearing as being ware of the sounds with your ears.

In hearing you may not be analysing or evaluating anything about what you are hearing. It is possible for your ears to be detecting sound without understanding or you responding to it.

Unlike listening, hearing is a passive automatic process of simply perceiving sounds.

Listening involves both verbal and non-verbal communication. Listening involves both verbal and non-verbal communications in that response to presented messages is influenced by a factors like presenters gestures, body movements, eye contacts , dress code,cultural background, venue, expectation of listeners and other physical phenomenons.

Bathe in his paper ‘Listening’ says that hearing is a physiological phenomenon; hearing is a psychological act.

Whereas hearing can be involuntary, listening must be deliberate and it is difficult for it to happen without us putting effort to listen.

Difference between hearing and listening

  • hearing happens automatically where listening requires our effort
  • hearing can happen subconsciously, but listening requires decision to do it.
  • hearing is a physical function of the body but listening is an action we must choose to do
  • Hearing needs our ears only, listening needs both ears and our mind.

Every good conversation starts with good listening and poor listening can cost us important things in life like jobs, customers in business, relationships etc.

A doctor who does not listen can cause loss of lives. Imagine a plane operator who does not listen communications with the pilot. poor listening can be costly and even bring disastrous results

Effective listening takes time and effort and sometimes may require training of mind. It costs time and energy to listen but profits of listening are worthy the efforts.

Listening is very important in professional world, a judge need to listen carefully to both the prosecution team and the defense team in a law court if he has to make sound judgement. Similarly, a lawyer must listen to his/her clients carefully if he/she will represent their case effectively. students must listen to a teacher carefully if they have to benefit from a lecture. A customer care who does not listen to customers will cause future loss of business to the company.

Active listening is a hard work because it requires concentration on the speaker’s communication yet our minds have tendency of wondering as it is easily distracted by physical or imaginary things . We must practice a discipline in listening but our natural inclination does not favor listening most of the time.

Effective Listening will involves consciously dealing with things that are external or internal to us that interferes with our understanding of audio messages. For example if you have an issue disturbing you in personal life, you may find yourself thinking about it most of the time amidst a lecture and so you find yourself missing out on most of what is spoken.

Levels of listening

Listening is more than just a simple activity and happens in varying levels of concentration that are determine by factors like:

  • purpose of listening e.g whether to understand a thing or just an entertainment.
  • physical state
  • psychological state
  • physiological state e.g hungry person may not listen effectively
  • your background knowledge on what is being spoken
  • content of what is spoken etc.

stages of Listening

According to Joseph De Vito, listening occurs in five stages that includes receiving, understanding, remembering, evaluating and responding.

1. Receiving

Also called sensing. It is the intentional on hearing a speaker’s message by filtering out other sources of communication so that we isolate the message from the speaker and avoid distractive stimuli from other sources. This is a stage we only hear what is being spoken.

You must hear the message as the first step towards other stages of listening.

2. Understanding

This is a stage where we attempts to learn the meaning a message we have heard.If a speaker does not enunciate the message clearly, it becomes understand the message.

Our brain is the main tool needed to help us understand the message . Our cultural backgrounds and personal experiences influences the kind of meaning to the words we hear so that the way understand is influenced by our own perception and experiences. When listening, we should be on the look out for areas of communication where our perception may differ from those intended by the speaker.

3. Remembering

Remembering is being able to bring back to mind what you have heard some few minutes after hearing it. Remembering is committing to memory what you have heard and it is an indication of listening. If you cannot remember what you heard,then your listening is not effective.

The most common reason for not remembering a spoken message is because it was not really learned in the first place(Wolvin & Coakley,1996. Distractions during listening reduces greatly our ability to remember.

4. Evaluating

This involves making some judgement about the message heard to determine whether it is valuable to us, it is making sense or whether is wrong. Evaluation of the same message can vary widely from one person to another because of our perception, culture and experiences.The communication skills of the speaker will have a great role on how listeners will evaluate the message.One should avoid making skewed judgement on a message beacuse of personal prejudice on the speaker.

5. Feedback

It is when a listener indicates his/her involvement by reacting in a manner that can be detected by the speaker. For example students in class gives feedback to the teacher by making notes. Another feedback is when listeners looks for clarification by asking questions on what was said.

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