FDHCM001: INTRO TO HUMAN COMMUNICATION
SULAY JALLOH
1
LISTENING:
More Than Meets the Ear
LECTURES’ OBJECTIVES:
You Should Understand:
1. The most common misconceptions about listening.
2. The five components of the listening process.
3. The most common types of ineffective listening.
4. The challenges that make effective listening difficult.
5. The skills necessary to listen effectively in informational, critical,
and empathic settings.
IS LISTENING IMPORTANT?
Listening is just as important as speaking. After all, it’s impossible for
communication to occur without someone receiving a sender’s message.
1. Frequency: We spend more time in listening to others than in any
other type of communication.
2. Relational Skill: Some theorists have argued that effective listening
is an essential ingredient in effective relational communication.
FDHCM001: INTRO TO HUMAN COMMUNICATION
SULAY JALLOH
2
CLARIFYING MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT LISTENING
1. Listening and hearing are not the same thing
a. Hearing is the process in which sound waves strike the
eardrum and cause vibrations that are transmitted through the
brain.
b. Listening occurs when the brain reconstructs these
electrochemical impulses into a representation of the original
sound and then gives them meaning.
Several stages in the listening process:
1. Attending is the act of paying attention to a signal. An individual
needs, wants, desired and interest determine what is attended to.
2. Understanding is the process of making sense of a message. i.e:
knowing the denotative and the connotative meanings of a message.
3. Responding consist of giving observable feedback to the speaker
as a) it helps the you to clarify your understanding of a speaker’s
message and b) it shows that you care about what the that speaker
is saying.
4. Remembering: Research has revealed that people remember only
about half of what they hear immediately after hearing.
2. Listening is Not a natural process: Listening is not like breathing
a natural activity that people do well.
3. Listening requires effort: Listening requires mental effort by the
receiver. I.e: Listening is not Passive, but active.
4. All listeners do not receive the same message due to
physiological factors, social roles, cultural background, and
personal interest and so on.
FDHCM001: INTRO TO HUMAN COMMUNICATION
SULAY JALLOH
3
OVERCOMING CHALLENGES TO EFFECTIVE
LISTENING
1) Faulty Listening behaviors: Most people possess one or more habits
that keep them from understanding truly important messages:
a. Pseudolistening: They give the appearance of being attentive
b. Selective Listening: They respond only to the parts of a speaker
remarks that interest them, rejecting everything else.
c. Defensive Listening: They take innocent comments as personal
attacks
d. Ambushing: They collect information to attack what you have
to say. E.g: The cross-examining prosecution attorney.
e. Insulated Listening: Listeners who avoid listening.
f. Insensitive Listening: They take a speaker’s remarks as ‘face
value’
g. Stage Hogging: They try to turn the topic of conversation to
themselves instead of showing interest in the speaker.
2) Reasons for poor listening
a) Effort: Knowing that passive listening is not enough,
you should invest the energy to understand others.
b) Message overload: The amount of speech most of us encounter
every day makes careful listening to everything we hear impossible.
c) Rapid Thought: Although we are capable of understanding
speech at rates up to 600 words per minutes, the average person
speaks between 100 and 140 words per minutes. Thus, we have
‘spare time’ to spend while someone is talking.
FDHCM001: INTRO TO HUMAN COMMUNICATION
SULAY JALLOH
4
d) Psychological Noise: we are often wrapped up in personal
concerns that are more immediate importance to us than the
message others are sending.
e) Physical noise: The world often present distractions (sound of
traffic, music other’s speech) that makes it hard to pay attention to
others.
f) Hearing problems: Sometimes a person’s listening ability
suffers from a hearing problem.
g) Faulty assumptions: We think…
 We’ve Heard it all Before
 Speaker’s Words are Too Simple/Obvious
 Speaker’s Words are Too Complex
 Subject is Unimportant or Uninteresting
h) Talking has more apparent advantages: Listening lacks of
Apparent Advantages. Such as:
 Control
 Admiration or Respect
 Energy Release
i) Cultural Differences: The way members of different cultures
communicate can affect listening. E.g: The Germans and the
Japanese.
j) Media Influences: A growing amount of programming consists
of short segments: news items, commercials, music and so on.
These trends discourage the kind of focused attention that is
necessary for careful listening.
FDHCM001: INTRO TO HUMAN COMMUNICATION
SULAY JALLOH
5
LISTENING STYLES
Not everyone listens the same way. Communication researchers have
identified four styles:
1. Content oriented listeners are most interested in the quality of
messages they hear.
Advantage: They are valuable when the goal is to evaluate the
quality of ideas and when there is a need in looking at the issue in
different perspective.
Disadvantage: They risk annoying people who don’t have the
same sort of analytical orientation and challenging of ideas can be
perceived as overly critical and hostile.
2. People Oriented Listeners are especially concern with creating and
maintaining positive relationships and more interested in supporting
people than evaluating them.
Advantage: They tune into others moods and respond to others
feelings and less judgmental.
Disadvantage: It is easy to become overly involve with others
feelings may lose their ability to assess the quality of information
and they can be viewed as overly expressive and even intrusive.
3. Action Oriented Listeners are most concerned with the task at hand.
I.e: their main concern is to figure out what sort of response is required
by the message.
Advantage: They keep a focus on the job at hand and even
encourage others to be organized and concise.
Disadvantage: They minimize emotional issues and concerns,
which may be an important part of business and personal
transactions.
FDHCM001: INTRO TO HUMAN COMMUNICATION
SULAY JALLOH
6
4. Time oriented listeners are most concern with efficiency. They view
time as a scarce and valuable commodity.
Advantage: They can be asset when deadlines and other pressures
demand fast action.
Disadvantage: They can put off others when it seems to disregard
their feelings. They can also hamper the kind of thoughtful
deliberation that some jobs require.
A. INFORMATIONAL LISTENING
Informational listeners’ goal is to make sure that they are receiving the
same thoughts the other person is trying to convey.
To be more effective as informational listener:
1) Don’t argue or judge prematurely
2) Separate the message from the speaker
3) Be opportunistic
4) Look for key ideas
5) Ask questions
 Sincere questions:
o Questions that Clarify Thoughts and Feelings
o Questions are Often Underused
o People are Often Reluctant to Ask Questions
o People Think They Already Understand so They Don’t
Question
 Avoid Counterfeit questions which comes in several varieties:
o make statements
o carry hidden agendas
o seek “correct” answers
o based on unchecked assumptions
FDHCM001: INTRO TO HUMAN COMMUNICATION
SULAY JALLOH
7
6) Paraphrase which means:
• Change the Speaker’s Wording
• Offer an Example of What You Think the Speaker is Talking
About
• Reflect the Underlying Theme of the Speaker’s Remarks
7) Take notes
 Don’t wait too long before beginning to jot down ideas
 Record only key ideas
 Develop a note-taking format
B. CRITICAL LISTENING
Critical listening is to judge the quality of a message in order to decide
whether to accept or reject it.
To be more effective as critical listener:
1) Listen for information before evaluating
2) Evaluate the speaker’s credibility
 Is the speaker competent?
 Is the speaker impartial?
3) Examine speaker’s evidence and reasoning
 Is the evidence recent enough?
 Is enough evidence presented?
 Is the evidence from a reliable source?
 Can the evidence be interpreted in more than one way?
4) Examine emotional appeals
FDHCM001: INTRO TO HUMAN COMMUNICATION
SULAY JALLOH
8
EMPATHIC LISTENING
Empathic listeners’ goal is to build a relationship or held the speaker
solve a problem.
To be more effective as an empathic listener:
1) Advising
 Be confident that the advice is correct
 Ask yourself whether the person seeking your advice seems
willing to accept it
 Be certain that the receiver won’t blame you if the advice
doesn’t work out
2) Judging
 The person with the problem should have requested an
evaluation from you.
 Your judgment is genuinely constructive and not designed to
be a put-down.
3) Analyzing
 Offer your interpretation in a tentative way rather than as
absolute fact
 Your analysis ought to have a reasonable chance of being
correct
 You ought to be sure that the other person will be receptive
to your analysis
 Be sure that your motive for offering an analysis is truly to
help the other person
5) Questioning
 Don’t ask questions just to satisfy your own curiosity
 Be sure your questions won’t confuse or distract the person
you’re trying to help
 Don’t use questions to disguise your suggestions or criticisms
FDHCM001: INTRO TO HUMAN COMMUNICATION
SULAY JALLOH
6) Supporting
 Make sure your expression of support is sincere
 Be sure the other person can accept your support
7) Prompting
 involves using silences and brief statements of
encouragement to draw others out, and in so doing, helping
them solve their own problems
8) Paraphrasing
 Is the problem complex enough?
 Do you have the necessary time and concern?
 Are you genuinely interested in helping the other person?
 Can you withhold judgment?
 Is your paraphrasing in proportion to other responses?
9) When and How to Help
 Think about the situation
 Think about the other person
 Think about yourself
9