Process of Listening

Listening Skills

Listening is an important component of the entire process of communication. It is the ability to receive and interpret messages accurately in the communication process. Listening is key to all effective communication. Listening can be described as a skill that involves receiving, interpreting and responding to the message sent by the communicator.

Factors that helps in Listening:

Intelligence: The intelligence of the listener is an important factor that helps or hampers his listening capabilities.

Verbal Competence: It also plays a significant role, for greater comprehension one should be familiar with the speaker’s language.

Motivation: Motivation is the important part of listening without motivation speaker cannot arise interest among audience and he will not be able to keep his audience engrossed and alert.

Listening Process

There are five stages of listening process-

Receiving, Understanding(Interpreting), Remembering, Evaluating and Responding.

Responding

Acting

Remembering

 

1. Receiving: In receiving we hear the message and take note of it. The efficiency of this stage can be affected by various external factors such as noise, poor hearing, and lack of attention.

2. Interpreting: At this stage we interpret the speaker’s word. We may need to consider whether the speaker’s frame of reference is similar or different to ours. And how this will affect our understanding of the speakers meaning.

3. Remembering: After interpretation of the received message we store it for future reference. We make a mental note of the key points as they are told.

4. Evaluating: At this stage we assess the importance of received message.

5. Responding (Acting): While listening, the response given may be in the form of nods or sounds of approval or rejection. This is the final stage of listening i.e. actually working on the thing that has been told.

Types of listening

Passive/ Ignoring: This is the kind of listening where the receiver is entirely ignoring the message as well as the sender of the message. The physical presence is there but the listener is mentally absent in passive listening. All that is being said is heard but not understood. In this type of listening, the listener pretends to be listening but is absorbed in thinking or doing something else. 

Marginal listening: This kind of listening occurs when there is provision of too much information. This leads to the overloading of the information. Here, the listener tends to listen the whole thing, but superficially. On broad perspective, listener knows the subject of the communication but very briefly i.e. the details are totally ignored. 

Selective Listening: Each listener has within him a frame of reference in which he tries to adopt the perspective of the speaker.

Sensitive/ Emphatic: Sensitive listening is also known as emphatic listening or sympathetic listening. This is the ultimate kind of listening that is done not just to listen but to understand the speaker’s world as he sees it. In this situation, one empathizes with the speaker, understands his view point but does not necessarily agree with him. 

Active listening: The most important aspect of listening is active listening. The receiver understands and absorbs all that is being said and also cross questions to verify all that he has been listening to. He makes an attempt to verify whatever he heard is correct.