Chapter 6: Listening

Real Reference: A Study Tool

Now that you have finished reading this chapter, you can:

Outline the listening process and styles of listening:

Hearing is physiologically perceiving sound; listening is the process of recognizing, understanding, and interpreting the message (p. 152).
Effective listening involves three components (p. 152).
- The degree to which we are willing to listen is the affective component (p. 153).
- The cognitive component involves selecting (choosing one sound over others), attending (focusing on the message), and understanding (making sense of the message) (p. 153).
- The behavioral component includes recalling information to communicate—remembering—and responding, giving feedback (pp. 154–155).
Active listeners make choices about selecting, attending, and so on, and are more competent than passive listeners (p. 155). Listening fidelity is the degree to which the thoughts of the listener agree with the intentions of the source of the message (p. 155).
People-oriented listeners listen with relationships in mind (p. 157).
Action-oriented listeners focus on tasks (p. 157).
Content-oriented listeners carefully evaluate what they hear (p. 157).
Time-oriented listeners prefer information that is clear and to the point (p. 157).
Most people develop multiple listening preferences (p. 157).

List the advantages of listening well:

Listening well helps your career, saves time and money, creates opportunities, strengthens relationships, and helps you achieve goals (p. 159).
Informational listening is used to understand a message (p. 160).
In critical listening, you evaluate information, evidence, ideas, or opinions (pp. 160–161).
Empathic listening is an attempt to know how another person feels, often using paraphrasing to recognize and elaborate on the other’s feelings (pp. 161–162).
Appreciative listening is used when the goal is simply to appreciate the sounds, such as listening to music (p. 162).

Identify challenges to good listening and their remedies:

Listening barriers are factors that interfere with our ability to comprehend information and respond appropriately (pp. 162–163).
Allergies and crying babies are examples of environmental factors that impair our ability to listen (p. 163).
Hearing loss challenges can be overcome with understanding of nonverbal behaviors (pp.163–164). Processing challenges (for example, ADD) are faced by many who have normal hearing.
Multitasking, attending to several things at once, limits focus on any one task (p. 164).
A boring speaker or topic can be hard to follow, but overexcitement can be distracting (pp. 164–165).
Talking may be regarded as more powerful than listening (p. 166).
Overconfidence may cause us to become lazy and not pay careful attention during communication (p. 166).
Listening apprehension, anxiety or dread associated with listening, may hinder concentration (p. 166).

Identify ethical factors in the listening process:

Defensive listening is responding with aggression and arguing with the speaker, without fully listening to the message (p. 168).
Selective listening is zeroing in on bits of information that interest you (pp. 168–169). Insensitive listening occurs when we fail to pay attention to the emotional content of someone’s message and just take it at face value (p. 169).
Self-absorbed listeners listen for their own needs and may practice monopolistic listening, or listening in order to control the communication interaction (p. 170).
Pseudolistening is pretending to listen while not really paying attention (p. 170).

Describe how various contexts affect listening: