Critical Listening: Analytical

What is Critical Listening?

 According to Critical Thinking experts Richard Paul and Linda Elder, critical listening is “A mode of
monitoring how we are listening so as to maximize our accurate understanding of what the other person is
trying to explain” and that it involves analyzing spoken words to determine their purpose and meaning.

 It is a form of listening that involves analysis, critical thinking and judgment. It allows us to use our
critical thinking skills that helps us in analyzing the speaker’s message and motives to assess the message
for authenticity and truth.

 This has 2 sub-skills namely, Analytical and Evaluative Listening (one is being a prerequisite of the
other since a person first employs analytical listening before moving on to Evaluative listening).

A. Analytical Listening
 This focused more on the interpretation and meaning of the actual sound.
 It is a way of listening to an audio composition
whereby the meaning of the sounds are
interpreted.
 This contributes to analytical thinking
which includes the ability to think:
 linearly and logically in a step-by-
step way,
 hypothetically and scientifically establishing a “what if” hypothesis, collecting and examining
clues and data to confirm it, and
 deductively, putting together the evidences and drawing conclusions.

Strategies in developing Analytical Listening Skills:

1. TQLR Technique:
 T - Tune in (Students are to tune in to the topic and recall what they know about it.)
 Q - Questions students generate
 L - Listen to the text with questions in mind
 R - Respond

2. Sectional Approach:
Advantages:
 It is ideal for long listening texts.
 It allows teachers to break up a long text into it’s component parts or sections thereby reducing the memory load on
the part of the listener.
 It highlights the different parts or sections of the overall “macro-discourse pattern” of the text.
 It enables the listener to see the relationships between and among the parts.
 It guides the students through the different stages of analysis.

Disadvantages:
 Students may have a fragmented view of the text/selection since it’s broken down into sections. They may have
difficulty seeing it in totality.
 Since the text is quite long, reading it aloud to all 5 or 7 classes of a teacher will certainly tax the teacher’s voice.

The Macro Discourse Pattern:

 it is the logical arrangement of ideas in an expository text or oral presentation for informational purposes
based on a larger scale
  according to Winifred Crombie (Author and Lecturer in Linguistics at The Hatfield Polytechnic University
in England), ideas in the text may be arranged following two possible macro-discourse patterns namely,
Problem-Solution (PSn) and Topic-Restriction-Illustration (TRI).

Two types of Macro Discourse Pattern:

1. Problem-Solution (PSn) Macro Discourse pattern first presents the problem which is then followed by a
solution. It’s most basic discourse type has only two discourse elements namely, a problem and a solution.
Example:
In the class of Ms. Lopez, many of her students Problem
did not pass the exam.

Therefore, she conducted a remedial class and

provided different activities to the students so Solution
they will be able to understand well the lesson.

Note: Although, the basic Problem-Solution (PSn) Macro Discourse pattern has only 2 elements, it can still be modified
in three ways:
a) Reordering
- solution to a problem is mentioned first before the problem
- text will be outlined as (SnP) or Solution-Problem
b) Addition
- this is the full blown PSn macro-discourse pattern
- a situation (S) is presented and this situation gives rise to the problem (P), then a
number of solutions are attempted (Sn) leading to a final result (R). Then, an
evaluation (E) is made.
c) Conflation
- instead of presenting the elements in a series of related sentences, two or even more
of them may be put together in just one sentence.

2. Topic-Restriction-Illustration (TRI) Macro Discourse pattern

T - What is the general topic?
R - What information restricts the topic?
I - What examples illustrate the topic?