Test your listening skills by watching a monologue from a late-night talk show. After viewing it once, write down a summary of the monologue. Then, watch it again with your summary in hand and see how much you remembered. Try the same activity with a cooking program. If you try both variations on this activity, are the outcomes any different? If so, what is different, and why?

For five or ten minutes in class, try viewing your public speaking instructor as a speaker trying to keep an audience (the class) engaged in effective listening. What are the strategies he or she uses to keep the audience listening? To reduce ineffective listening? To adapt to nonverbal cues while scanning the audience? How could your instructor be more effective in encouraging effective listening?

In your speech class, there will probably be at least one presentation in which a speaker leaves time for a question-and-answer session with audience members. When this occurs, pay special attention to how the speaker listens to audience questions—and whether he or she is listening or hearing. Do the speaker’s responses come from argumentative, agenda-driven, or interruptive listening? Likewise, watch to see how audience members listen to responses from the speaker. Are they argumentative? Defeated? Nonlistening?