Lesson 4: Listening
Comprehensive or Active Listening
1. What is Listening?
✘ Listening is the ability to accurately
receive and interpret messages in the
communication process. It is the process of
receiving, constructing meaning from, and
responding to spoken and/or non-verbal
messages.
✘ It is an active process by which we make
sense of, assess, and respond to what we
hear. It requires concentration, which is the
focusing of your thoughts upon one
particular topic.
2. Hearing Vs. Listening
Hearing
✘ It refers to the sounds that enter your ears.
✘ It is a physical process which provides
that you do not have any hearing problems.
✘ It happens automatically or naturally.
✘ It is passive.
✘ It is more of physiological.
Listening
✘ It is done by choice.
✘ It is interpretative action taken by
someone in order to understand and
potentially make meaning of something they
hear.
✘ It is a physical and mental process, active,
learned process, and a skill.
✘ It is more of psychological.
3. Types of Listening
Types of Listening:
A. Appreciative Listening
B. Emphatic Listening
C. Comprehensive or Active Listening
D. Critical or Analytical Listening
A. Appreciative Listening
✘ Listening for pleasure and enjoyment,
as when we listen to music, to a comedy
routine, or to an entertaining speech.
✘ It describes how well speakers choose
and use words, use humor, ask questions,
tell stories, and argue persuasively.
B. Emphatic Listening
✘ Listening to provide emotional
support for the speaker, as when a
psychiatrist listens to a patient or when
we lend a sympathetic ear to a friend.
✘ It focuses on understanding and
identifying a person’s situation, feelings,
or motives. There is an attempt to
understand what the other person is
feeling.
C.
✘ Listening to understand the message
of a speaker, as when we attend a
classroom lecture or listen to directions
for finding a friend’s house.
✘ It focuses on accurately understanding
the meaning of the speaker’s words
while simultaneously interpreting non-
verbal cues such as facial expressions,
gestures, posture, and vocal quality.
✘ It is a particular communication
technique that requires the listener to
provide feedback on what he or she
hears to the speaker.
Three (3) Main Degrees of Comprehensive or
Active Listening
1. Repeating
It requires perceiving, paying attention, and
remembering. Repeating the messages
involve using exactly the same words used
by the speaker.
2. Paraphrasing
It requires thinking and reasoning. It
involves rendering the message using similar
phrase arrangement to the ones used by the
speaker.
3. Reflecting
It involves rendering the message using your
own words and sentence structure.
D. Critical or Analytical Listening
✘ Listening to evaluate a message for
purposes of accepting or rejecting it, as
when we listen to the sales pitch of a
used car dealer or the campaign speech
of a political candidate.
✘ It focuses on evaluating whether a
message is logical and reasonable.
✘ It asks you to make judgments based
on your evaluation of the speaker’s
arguments.
✘ It challenges the speaker’s message
by evaluating its accuracy and
meaningfulness, and utility.
✘ It uses critical thinking skills.
4. Critical Thinking Skills
✘ The intellectually disciplined process of
actively and skillfully conceptualizing,
applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or
evaluating information gathered from or
generated by, observation, experience,
reflection, reasoning, or communication as a
guide to belief and action.
✘ It is the process by which people
qualitatively and quantitatively assess the
information they have accumulated, and
how they in turn use that information to
solve problems and forge new pattern of
understanding.
 ✘ Critical thinking skills include
observation, interpretation, analysis,
inference, evaluation, explanation, and
metacognition.

Critical thinkers are those who are able to do the

following:
1. Recognize problems and find workable solutions
to those problems.
2. Understand the importance of prioritization in the
hierarchy of problem solving tasks.
3. Gather relevant information.
4. Read between the lines by recognizing what is
not said or stated.
5. Use language clearly, efficiently, and with
efficacy.
6. Interpret data and form conclusions based on that
data.
7. Determine the presence of lack of logical
relationships.