Effective Listening Skills

Most of what we do in the Writing Center is listen, but there’s a difference between hearing and understanding the words someone is saying and listening to their message. Listening to your writers and your coworkers is vital to maintaining good conversation and avoiding misunderstandings that might lead to unnecessary conflict.

The listening process

The listening process involves four stages: receiving, understanding, evaluating, and responding. Basically, an effective listener must hear and identify the speech sounds directed toward them, understand the message of those sounds, critically evaluate or assess that message, remember what’s been said, and respond (either verbally or nonverbally) to information they’ve received. Effectively engaging with all five stages of the listening process lets us best gather the information we need from others.

Receiving

Paired with hearing, attending is the other half of the receiving stage in the listening process. Attending is the process of accurately identifying and interpreting particular sounds we hear as words. The sounds we hear have no meaning until we give them their meaning in context. Listening is an active process that constructs meaning from both verbal and nonverbal messages.

Understanding

The second stage in the listening process is the understanding stage. Understanding or comprehension is “shared meaning between parties in a communication transaction” and constitutes the first step in the listening process. This is the stage during which the listener determines the context and meanings of the words he or she hears. Determining the context and meaning of individual words, as well as assigning meaning in language, is essential to understanding sentences. This, in turn, is essential to understanding a speaker’s message.

Before getting the big picture of a message, it can be difficult to focus on what the speaker is saying. In the Writing Center, you and your writer may have trouble understanding each other if you have different accents, if the writer is struggling with language fluency, or if the space is very noisy.

One tactic for better understanding a speaker’s meaning is to ask questions. Asking questions allows you as the listener to fill in any holes you may have in the mental reconstruction of the speaker’s message.

Evaluating

During the evaluating stage, the listener determines whether or not the information they heard and understood from the speaker is well constructed or disorganized, biased or unbiased, true or false, significant or insignificant. They also ascertain how and why the speaker has come up with and conveyed the message that they delivered. This may involve considerations of a speaker’s personal or professional motivations and goals. For example, a listener may determine that a coworker’s forgetting to clean off their table is factually correct, but may also understand that the co-worker’s child is sick and that may be putting them on edge. A voter who listens to and understands the points made in a political candidate’s stump speech can decide whether or not those points were convincing enough to earn their vote.

The evaluating stage occurs most effectively once the listener fully understands what the speaker is trying to say. While we can, and sometimes do, form opinions of information and ideas that we don’t fully understand—or even that we misunderstand—doing so is not often ideal in the long run. Having a clear understanding of a speaker’s message allows a listener to evaluate that message without getting bogged down in ambiguities or spending unnecessary time and energy addressing points that may be tangential or otherwise nonessential.

Responding

The responding stage is the stage of the listening process in which the listener provides verbal and/or nonverbal reactions. A listener can respond to what they hear either verbally or non-verbally. Nonverbal signals can include gestures such as nodding, making eye contact, tapping a pen, fidgeting, scratching or cocking their head, smiling, rolling their eyes, grimacing, or any other body language. These kinds of responses can be displayed purposefully or involuntarily. Responding verbally might involve asking a question, requesting additional information, redirecting or changing the focus of a conversation, cutting off a speaker, or repeating what a speaker has said back to her in order to verify that the received message matches the intended message.

Nonverbal responses like nodding or eye contact allow the listener to communicate their level of interest without interrupting the speaker, thereby preserving the speaker/listener roles. When a listener responds verbally to what they hear and remember—for example, with a question or a comment—the speaker/listener roles are reversed, at least momentarily.

Responding adds action to the listening process. Oftentimes, the speaker looks for verbal and nonverbal responses from the listener to determine if and how their message is being understood and/or considered. Based on the listener’s responses, the speaker can choose to either adjust or continue with the delivery of her message. For example, if a listener’s brow is furrowed and their arms are crossed, the speaker may determine that she needs to lighten their tone to better communicate their point. If a listener is smiling and nodding or asking questions, the speaker may feel that the listener is engaged and her message is being communicated effectively.

Barriers to effective listening

Low Concentration

Low concentration, or not paying close attention to speakers, is detrimental to effective listening. It can result from various psychological or physical situations such as visual or auditory distractions, physical discomfort, inadequate volume, lack of interest in the subject material, stress, or personal bias. Regardless of the cause, when a listener is not paying attention to a speaker’s dialogue, effective communication is significantly diminished.

Lack of Prioritization

Just as lack of attention to detail in a conversation can lead to ineffective listening, so can focusing too much attention on the least important information. Listeners need to be able to pick up on social cues and prioritize the information they hear to identify the most important points within the context of the conversation.

Often, the information the audience needs to know is delivered along with less pertinent or irrelevant information. When listeners give equal weight to everything they hear, it makes it difficult to organize and retain the information they need. For instance, students who take notes in class must know which information is worth writing down within the context of an entire lecture. Writing down the lecture word for word is impossible as well as inefficient.

Poor Judgment

When listening to a speaker’s message, it is common to sometimes overlook aspects of the conversation or make judgments before all of the information is presented. Listeners often engage in confirmation bias, which is the tendency to isolate aspects of a conversation to support one’s own preexisting beliefs and values. This psychological process has a detrimental effect on listening for several reasons.

First, confirmation bias tends to cause listeners to enter the conversation before the speaker finishes her message and, thus, form opinions without first obtaining all pertinent information. Second, confirmation bias detracts from a listener’s ability to make accurate critical assessments. For example, a listener may hear something at the beginning of a speech that arouses a specific emotion. Whether anger, frustration, or anything else, this emotion could have a profound impact on the listener’s perception of the rest of the conversation.

Focusing on Style, Not Substance

In the case of listening, distracting or larger-than-life elements in a speech or presentation can deflect attention away from the most important information in the conversation or presentation. These distractions can also influence the listener’s opinion. For example, if a message is delivered in a way you perceive as abrupt or rude, you’re much less likely to understand (or want to understand) the message.

Cultural differences (including speakers’ accents, vocabulary, and misunderstandings due to cultural assumptions) can also obstruct the listening process. The same biases apply to the speaker’s physical appearance. To avoid this obstruction, listeners should be aware of these biases and focus on the substance, rather than the style of delivery, or the speaker’s voice and appearance.

The solution: active listening

The contents of this section are in part from “Active Listening” by Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Active listening is a particular communication technique that requires the listener to provide feedback on what he or she hears to the speaker, by way of restating or paraphrasing what they have heard in their own words. The goal of this repetition is to confirm what the listener has heard and to confirm the understanding of both parties. The ability to actively listen demonstrates sincerity, and that nothing is being assumed or taken for granted. Active listening is most often used to improve personal relationships, reduce misunderstanding and conflicts, strengthen cooperation, and foster understanding.

When engaging with a particular speaker, a listener can use several degrees of active listening, each resulting in a different quality of communication with the speaker. It’s important to keep in mind that these listening skills are based in the American style of communicating. If your consultee seems uncomfortable or confused, try something else.

he three the main techniques for active listening are paraphrasing, clarifying and summarizing.

• Paraphrasing is restating the speaker’s thought, in your own words. For instance, “I think you’re saying that…” or “It sounds like you’re saying …”. This is so they know you understand, or don’t understand, in which case they can clarify for you.
• Clarifying involves asking questions to make sure that you understand. For example, “Can you give me an example of that?” or “You just said that such and such is important, can you help me understand what that means to you?”
• Summarizing is accurately and briefly summarizing the intent of their message. For instance, “I think the main ideas here are …”

Active Listening Guidelines

• Put the focus of attention on the speaker
• Paraphrase and clarify
• Summarize
• Don’t discuss your own reactions or give well-intentioned comments like,”I know what you mean.”, “Oh yeah, that same thing happened to me.”, or “I don’t agree because… ” This is not a time to articulate your own view points or turn the attention back to yourself.
• Don’t ignore the speaker’s feelings
• Don’t pretend that you understand their meaning if you don’t. It’s perfectly fine to ask for clarification. For example, “What did you mean by…?” or “Can you tell me more about…?”
• Don’t ignore the non-verbal content. People’s body language, facial expressions, gestures, pitch, tone, can give you clues about what they are thinking and feeling.
• Don’t think about what you will say next. (Probably the hardest guideline to follow) It seems it is our default response when we are getting into a rather heated conversation with somebody, we’re just holding our breath until we can get a chance to insert our opinion, and that is the opposite of active listening.

External Links

“Active Listening Strategies” by Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences

“Notes on Communication: Active Listening” by G.T. Coates

“Improving Listening Competence” from UMN Libraries

Except where noted, the content of this page is adapted from Curation and Revision and “Listening and Critical Thinking,” provided by Boundless.com. License: CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike