1

Lesson 2

Listening Skills, Purpose and Process

WAYS TO HELP STUDENTS LISTEN, NOT JUST HEAR

1. Get to know students-and let them get to know you: Students are more
likely to listen to instructors who have taken the time to get to know them as
individuals. They’re also more likely to listen to someone they view as three-
dimensional -as opposed to a talking head. Make a concerted effort to learn
their names, hobbies, and interests, and help them see that you are a warm-
blooded and even fallible person.
2. Let others do the talking: Listen to each grapple with issue, think through
problems, and share viewpoints can be just as (if not more) illuminating for
students as hearing you do it.
3. Hold them accountable for listening: If you truly want your students to
listen, you’ll have to give them a good reason to do so. At the very least, you
should avoid giving them reasons not to listen.
4. Model good listening behavior: Too often we start to formulate our next
statement while students are talking and don’t listen as intently as we should.
To enhance your own listening skills, consider trying what the counseling
profession calls “restatement.” Basically, you would paraphrase your students’
response to convey that you are genuinely listening and to make sure you
understood them correctly. You could also ask them to restate each other’s or
one of your points.
5. Let them help each other listen: Inevitably, student will miss something
important now and again. Instead of letting this upset you, consider allocating
a couple of minutes for what’s often called a “note-check.”
6. Keep them on their toes: Nothing encourages drifting off into one’s
imagination, falling asleep, or inattention more than monotony. If students
realize that at any moment you could call on them or ask them to work on an
exercise, they are much more likely to stay attentive.

THE LISTENING PROCESS

1. Receiving- is the intentional focus on hearing a speaker’s message, which

happens when we filter out other sources so that we can isolate the message
and avoid the confusing mixture of incoming stimuli. At this stage, we are still
only hearing the message.
2. Understanding- in the understanding stage, we attempt to learn the
meaning of the message.
3. Remembering- remembering begins with listening, if you can’t remember
something that was said, you might not have been listening effectively. Wolvin
and Coakley note that the most common reasons for not remembering a
message after the fact is because it wasn’t really learned in the first place.
Wolvin, A., & Coakley, C. G. (1996).
 2

4. Evaluating- the fourth stage in the listening process is evaluating, or judging

the value of the message.
5. Responding- sometimes referred to as feedback-is the fifth and final stage of
the listening process. It’s the stage at which you indicate your involvement.

TYPES OF LISTENING SKILLS

1. MARGINAL/PASSIVE LISTENING- Also called hearing or auding, the

listener hears the sounds often in the background but simply ignores because
he or she is engrossed in another task.
2. ATTENTIVE LISTENING- The listener focuses attention and shows
interest in what is being said. He or she takes note of the specific and how they
relate to the main points made by the speakers.
3. CRITICAL/ ANALYTICAL LISTENING- In this type of listening one has
to decide on the truth of ideas, pass judgement on claims made and make
decision on whether to accept what she/he hears, reject it or take it.
4. APPRECIATIVE LISTENING- This type of listening pleasure maybe from
the humor or the blending voices in choric arrangements.

Knowledge Required for Listening Process

Listening requires comprehension of the speaker’s intended message.
a. Command over major components of the language: phonology, lexicon,
syntax, semantics and text structure
b. Socio- cultural competence
c. Strategic competence
d. Discourse competence

The purposes for listening

Listening requires conscious mental effort and specific purpose. The purposes for
listening relate to “types” of listening:
 Are you listening to receive information?
 Are you listening to follow instructions?
 Are you listening to evaluate information?
 Are you listening for pleasure?
 Are you listening to empathize?

Listening Comprehension skills or Enabling skills:

 Listening for details-involves listening for specific information
 Listening for gist-listen for main ideas
 Drawing inferences-ability to fill in gaps in the input
 Listening selectively-listen only to specific parts of the input
 Making predictions-ability to anticipate before and during listening what one
is going to hear
Listening as a PRODUCT
 3

It shows what listeners do in order to demonstrate their understanding. It is

described in terms of outcome which are stated either verbally or non-verbally
Examples of listening outcomes:
 Follow instructions
 Organize and classify information
 Take effective notes
 Take dictation
 Transfer information into graphic forms
 Reconstruct original text
 Make appropriate oral response

Bottom-up listening
This refers to a process by which sounds are used to build up units of
information, such as words, phrase, clauses and sentences before the aural input is
understood.

Top-down processing
This refers to the application of background knowledge to facilitate
comprehension. It is general believed now that both top-down and bottom-up
processing occur at the same time in what is known as parallel processing (Eysenck,
1993).

The three categories of listening strategies are:

 Cognitive: process, interpret, store and recall information. This involves
strategies such as inferencing and prediction.
 Metacognitive: manage and facilitate mental process; cope with difficulties
during listening. Examples of such strategies include comprehension
monitoring and visualizing.
 Social-affective: ask the help of others to facilitate comprehension; manage
one’s emotions when listening such as confidence building and cooperation.