LISTENING SKILLS

Comprehensive / active - involves understanding the message or messages

listening that are being communicated
- the listener first needs appropriate vocabulary and
language skills
- to avoid confusion, the listener needs to accurately
understand the meaning of the speaker’s words while
simultaneously interprete non-verbal cues such as facial
expressions, gestures, posture and voice quality of the
sender/speaker
Steps in Comprehensive Listening
1) Listening carefully by using all available
senses
2) Paraphrasing what is heard both
mentally and verbally
3) Checking your understanding to ensure
accuracy
4) Providing feedback
Informative Listening - to understand the message.
- listeners are successful if the meaning they assign to
the message listened to is as close as possible to that
which the sender intended.
- much of our learning comes from informative listening

For eg., we listen to lectures or instructions

from teachers
– what we learn depends on how well we listen.
In the workplace, we listen to understand new practices
or procedures

– how well we perform depends on how well we listen.

We listen to instructions, briefings, reports and
speeches;
if we listen poorly, we aren’t equip with the information
we need.

Discriminative Listening - the most basic form of listening and does not involve
the understanding of the meaning of words or phrases
but merely the different sounds that are produced
- develops through childhood and into adulthood
- as we grow older and develop and gain more life
experience, our ability to distinguish between different
sounds is improved we eventually also develop the
ability to recognise subtle differences in the way that
sounds are made and what they mean such as
recognising foreign languages, distinguishing between
regional accents and clues to the emotions and feelings
 of the speaker when discriminative listening skills are
combined with visual stimuli, the resulting ability to
‘listen’ to body-language enables us to begin to
understand the speaker more fully

Critical / analytical  to evaluate or scrutinise what is being said

Listening  is about analysing opinion and making a judgement
 involve analysis of the information being received
and alignment with what we already know or believe
 it does not necessarily mean that you are claiming
that the information you are listening to is somehow
faulty or flawed
 often important, when listening critically, to have an
open-mind and not be biased by stereotypes or
preconceived ideas to broaden your knowledge and
perception of other people and your relationships
Identifying Main Ideas  to find out the general ideas or the gist of a listening
material
 to determining the main idea is to listen for key
words of the listening text
Note-taking  requires the skill of listening to the information,
understanding the gist of it and finally putting it down
into words as quickly as possible
 Note-taking can be made easier by:
a) listening effectively
- summarize whatever you have listened to
(listen for important details, leave out the
unnecessary ones)
- jot down key words/phrases (eg. specific
details – names, dates, figures), leave out
examples and illustrations
b) take notes effectively
- paraphrase what you have listened to, ie.
express it in a more concise manner and use
short forms as much as possible
- leave out unnecessary words (eg.Prepositions,
pronouns, articles)
- use headings, sub-headings and a numbering
system which you understand