TYPES OF

LISTENING
TYPES OF LISTENING
While certain skills are basic and necessary for
all types of listening (receiving, attending, and
understanding), each type requires some special
skills. This section discusses those special skills
and presents guidelines to improve listening
behavior in all situations.
 INFORMATIVE LISTENING
Informative listening refers to the situation
where the listener’s primary concern is to
understand the message.

There are three key variable related to

informative listening:
 Vocabulary

 Concentration

 Memory
 ATTENTIVE LISTENING
When people listen attentively, their goal is to
understand and remember what they are hearing.
Communication scholars have identified three
listening skill clusters and the accompanying
behavior that are used by attentive listeners:

 AttentiveSkills
 Following Skills

 Reflecting Skills
 Attention Skills:

A posture of involvement
 Appropriate body motion

 Eye Contact

 Non-distractive environment
 Following Skills:

 Door Openers
 Minimal encouragers

 Infrequent questions

 Attentive silence
 Reflecting Skills:

 Paraphrasing

 Reflecting feelings
 Reflecting meanings
 RELATIONSHIP LISTENING
The purpose of relationship listening is either to
help an individual or to improve the relationship
between people. Three attitudes are key to
effective relationship listening:

 Attending

 Supporting

 Empathizing
 APPRECIATIVE LISTENING
Appreciative listening includes listening to
music for enjoyment, to speakers because you
like style, to your choices in theater, television,
radio or film. The quality of appreciative
listening depends upon three factors:

 Presentation

 Perception

 Previous experience
 CRITICAL LISTENING
Politicians, the media, salesman, advocates of
policies and procedures, and our own financial,
emotional, intellectual, physical, and spiritual
needs require us to place a premium on critical
listening and the thinking that accompanies it.

 Ethos

 Logos

 Pathos
 DISCRIMINATIVE LISTENING
The final type of listening is discriminative
listening. It may be the most important type, for
it is basic to the other four.

 Hearing ability
 Awareness of sound structure

 Integration of non-verbal cues

EFFECTIVE AND INEFFECTIVE
LISTENING SKILLS
All of us can hear, but not all of us can listen.
Hearing and listening are not the same thing.
Good listening requires knowledge of technique
and practice very similar to good writing or good
speaking. Many people believe that good
listening skills are easy to learn or automatically
part of every person’s personality.
An active listener:

 Does not finish others, sentences

 Does not answer questions with questions

 Is aware of and guards against biases

 Never daydreams or becomes preoccupied with

his/her own thoughts when others talk
 Does not dominate the conversation

 Plans responses after the other person has

finished speaking, not while he/she is speaking