The Importance of Listening Listening Process Listening is essential in communication. Listening and hearing are different.

Hearing is a passive process while listening is a deliberate attention to what are spoken. Researches show that people spend half of conversation time to listening. Whatever the purpose of listening is, effective listeners aim to build shared-understanding between them and speakers. Active Listening Four determinants of active listening are attentive, encouraging, reflective, and empathetic. In active listening, listeners show their interest in what speaker are saying by providing attentive nonverbal cues such as supportive eyes contact, posture, body moving, proximity, environment factors, and avoiding producing distractions. To exploring underlying feelings of speakers, listeners can invite them to talk in a polite way or use open question such as How do you think about ?. Moreover, they either keep silent to allow speakers time to consider whether to continues or encourage them to keep talking by using minimal responses like uhm, I see. To confirm what listened are accurate, listeners clarify ambiguous massages by paraphrasing the speakers words. Moreover, listeners can summarise important points if conversation takes place too long. Listener can also reflect speakers feelings to show that they understand the speakers feelings. Beyond all these, active listener let speaker aware that they stand at the speakers position to understand problems. Empathy can overcome differences in culture background that distort intended messages. Other Listening Approaches Informational listener aims to get accurate information. Effective informational listener should focus on key point and clarify their understanding by asking question. Informational listener should not jump into conclusion early or assume speaker will provide all necessary information. Evaluative listening occurs when one is persuaded to take actions. Similar to informational listening, an effective evaluative listener also focus on key points and differentiate emotion and facts. They should provide immediate feedback based on facts.

Conversational listening occurs when listener and speaker exchange information and ideas. In this approach, ones perception determined by their background such as belief, value, cultural conditioning has great effect on interpreting messages. Conversation usually goes through five phases: greet, determine and agree on purpose and time of talking, discuss and close. Effective listener can use these strategies: focus on statements referred to speaker, clarify the main idea of all talking, and observe verbal and nonverbal part of massages. Barriers to Listening Effective listening fail due to these reasons: dreaming about something else, listeners interest in topic and speaker, hearing what expected, and listener prefers massages that require little efforts. Barriers to listening come from both listener and speaker. Behaviours of poor listener are: pretend to listen (nodders), dominate conversation by preventing others from talking (ear hogs), only listen what interest them (bees), acting as if they do not want to listen (earmuffs), wait for errors and criticise all the time (dart thowers), make up something to show they listened (gap fillers).