Listening: An Essential Part of Communication Skills

I. Introduction: Communication comes from the Latin word communis, meaning commonness. It is a process wherein knowledge, ideas, information, attitudes, and feelings are transmitted (Padilla et al, 2003 p. 3). Communication is a two-way process by which information is changed between or among individuals through a common system of symbols, sign and behaviour (Martinez, p1). It is an essential function of civilization. Basically it consists of writing, reading, speaking and listening. Listening is a skill that has to be practiced and learned. Among the four skills of communication, listening is the most ignored, yet it takes up the greatest amount of time in the study of these four skills (Igoy, 2004 p 85). Listening like any other skill, has to be practiced because we listen everyday and we think we know how to do it. Yet, like any other skill, we can learn to do it better and continue to improve our listening skills throughout our lives (Diaz, 2005, p. 28). At the end of the communication line is an indispensable element – the listener, the active participation of whom either makes or unmakes communication. How good at listening this element is, spells a big difference in the communication process. At this point, it part, comes though a constant awareness and study of how listeners respond. This is especially so if we consider the axiom that meaning is altogether in the mind of the listener.
II. 1. What is the listening? (Diaz, (2005 p. 28) simply states that listening is the active Intellectual process of decoding, interpreting, understanding and evaluating messages. It is a mode of communication just as important as the other modes like speaking, reading and writing. It is sad to note, however, that this mode has been observed to be the most neglected area in teaching English towards communicative competence. This is lamentable considering that we spend most of our working hours communicating, the greatest portion of which is listening. It is in some ways, more complicated than reading. You cannot re-listen as you can reread. The place is set for you. The listener must be determined and word meaning must be perceived immediately (Deighton 1971, p. 43).
2. Importance of listening. Norma D. Martinez( 2001, p. 15) discusses that to effect successful interaction and to share equal responsibility in achieving effective communication, you as the receiver of the message must realise how important listening is. Whatever purpose you have – say, you listen to follow directions, to obtain knowledge, to arrive at decisions, to evaluate information or to show appreciation; you must understand that listening plays a very important role to effect purposeful interaction. Rafael H. Diaz, (2005, P. 28) states that in school you do a lot of listening, but how good a listener are you? If you expect to go through college to earn a degree and be a successful professional someday, much of this skill will be required of you. Learning to cultivate this skill is therefore a must for you. This shows how vital the listening skill is. In today’s world, which is fast turning into a global village and where communication is highly developed, the demand to sharpen our listening power is high.
3. The Act of Listening. The act of listening involves four distinct processes: receiving, perceiving, interpreting, and responding (Bradley, 1991, pp. 41-43). 1. Receiving. The first listening process consists of two aspects: seeing and hearing. Seeing is important to listening because it enables us to observe the non-verbal forms of communication such as facial expression, gestures, and bodily movement. It is also important in recognizing sounds and words. Effective receiving involves good eyesight. This is physiological in nature because the brain interprets any given stimuli received by the sense of sight. It also involves hearing. If the person is deaf, listening is prevented because hearing cannot occur. 2. Perceiving. It is not enough to hear sounds in the environment; we must perceive them by focussing attention on the ones we want to listen to. The essence of paying attention comes in. When you notice something and mentally pick it up, there is processing involved. 3. Interpreting. Once we have received and perceived the visual and aural symbols, we then interpret them. Interpreting sounds is relative to the ability of the person listening. If the words are not familiar, there is difficulty in interpreting the meaning of speech. If it is a language we know, we try to determine the intended meaning. We must interpret not only the language, but also the meaning of the non-verbal communication. 4. Responding. A person responding to the speech communication exhibits listening by an organized set of movements. These responses cause speakers to be affected by listeners. You can’t simply be a recorder; you must interpret the meaning of the words and respond internally and externally to them.
4. The Listening Process According to Rafaela H. Diaz (2005, pp. 31-32), the listening process is made up of four stages. They are as follows: 1. The Physical or Attention Stage In this stage, listening begins with the ability to hear or to catch sounds with the use of the auditory system. A person must, therefore, be in the position or right mood to listen. He must be ready to listen. He must be free from distractions. The setting must, likewise, be conducive to listening. Then, can mental concentration be expected. 2. The logical or Auditory Discriminatory Stage Sounds caught by the hearing mechanism are transmitted to the brain to be sorted out, interpreted and given meaning. This second stage involves the listener’s ability to recognize, categorize and discriminate sounds analyzing them on the basis of the attributes of voice quality, pitch, volume and rate. It also involves his grasp of vocabulary. 3. The Semantic or Comprehension Stage This is the process of translating and interrelating sounds into thought symbols. This involves the listener’s ability to understand and give meaning to what he hears at the denotative and connotative levels to respond to the messages received. This has also something with the effective context of language. The listener’s feelings and emotions will affect his reaction and interaction with others. 4. The Retention Stage This refers to the listener’s ability to retain/remember the ideas conveyed and later to use these ideas in reacting with others in a definite speech setting.
5. Guides in Effective Listening To obtain the meaty substance and content of every speech, try these guides according to Alex V. Abelos et al (2006, pp. 139-140). 1. Know Your Purpose. Every speech has its purpose. The speech is effective if this is delivered with a purpose.” Likewise, the first thing good listeners do is figure out why they’re listening. You have to determine why you are listening. In effect, purpose directs and controls all the decisions why you listen. Wolvin and Coakley (1982, pp. 3-11) identified five kinds of listening that reflect purposes you may have when communicating with others. A) Appreciate listening or purposeful listening focuses on something other than the primary message. B) Discriminative listening or active listening requires listeners to draw conclusions from the way a message is presented rather than directly from what is said. C) Therapeutic listening is intended to provide emotional support for the speaker. D) Constructive listening for comprehension occurs when you want to gain additional information or insights from the speaker. E) Critical listening demands that you both interpret and evaluate their message. It is the most sophisticated and difficult kind of listening. It requires you to go beyond understanding the message to interpreting it, evaluating, and assessing its strengths and weaknesses, and comprehending its message and value. 2. Comprehend the Message. You’ve got to understand clearly what ideas you’re being asked to accept, how they are related to each other, and what sorts of facts and opinions underlie them. Listening for comprehension will help you understand the three essential aspects of speech content: ideas, structure, and supporting materials. 3. Assess the Speech. The main reason why the speaker is talking is because of you. So you’re the one who must make the judgments: good or bad, beautiful or ugly, just or unjust, fair or unfair, or true or false. Making such evaluations is the only way to keep yourself protected from inflated claims, distorting information, and vague advertisements. 4. Take Good Notes. To be an effective listener, train yourself to be a good note taker. This is necessary for you to document important information.
6. Listening Strategies Listening strategies are techniques or activities that contribute directly to the comprehension and recall of listening input. Listening strategies can be classified by how the listener processes the input. 1. Top-down strategies are listener based; the listener taps into background knowledge of the topic, the situation or context, the type of text, and the language. This background knowledge activates a set of expectations that help the listener to interpret what is heard and anticipate what will come next. Top-down strategies include * listening for the main idea * predicting * drawing inferences * summarizing 2. Bottom-up strategies are text based; the listener relies on the language in the message, that is, the combination of sounds, words, and grammar that creates meaning. Bottom-up strategies include * listening for specific details * recognizing cognates * recognizing word-order patterns 3. Strategic listeners also use metacognitive strategies to plan, monitor, and evaluate their listening. * They plan by deciding which listening strategies will serve best in a particular situation. * They monitor their comprehension and the effectiveness of the selected strategies. * They evaluate by determining whether they have achieved their listening comprehension goals and whether the combination of listening strategies selected was an effective one. 4. Listening for Meaning
To extract meaning from a listening text, students need to follow four basic steps: * Figure out the purpose for listening. Activate background knowledge of the topic in order to predict or anticipate content and identify appropriate listening strategies. * Attend to the parts of the listening input that are relevant to the identified purpose and ignore the rest. This selectivity enables students to focus on specific items in the input and reduces the amount of information they have to hold in short-term memory in order to recognize it. * Select top-down and bottom-up strategies that are appropriate to the listening task and use them flexibly and interactively. Students' comprehension improves and their confidence increases when they use top-down and bottom-up strategies simultaneously to construct meaning. * Check comprehension while listening and when the listening task is over. Monitoring comprehension helps students detect inconsistencies and comprehension failures, directing them to use alternate strategies (http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/listening/stratlisten.htm).
7. Barriers to Good Listening Skills. Julita G. Aquino (2006, pp.137-138) discusses that listening is easy to define but hard to practice. You’ve probably developed some barriers to good listening. You’ll have to remove those barriers from your mental habits if you’re going to improve. Each of us has idiosyncatic listening habits, but many people share these four problems. 1. Passive listening. Many of us are just plain lazy listeners, hoping that the speaker will be exceptionally clear. In turn, we forget more brilliant speeches and conversations than we care to remember. 2. Drifting thoughts. You can comprehend more words per minute than someone can utter; you can probably process about 300 to 500 words per minute, while speakers produce only about 100 to 150 words per minute. A time lag is created in your mind that occupies your thoughts. You are disrupted by internal perceptual field or the world of your own thought about a friend arriving from other country and many more. You may be distracted by elements in your external perceptual field such as an irritating tricycle engine passing by and many more as well. Listeners tend to drop in and out of the speeches, taking time out to play in the internal and external perceptual fields. 3. Intrusion of the past. Memories of past events can be triggered by a mere word or a reference to a place. That “nostalgia” effect affects our feelings, values, and attitudes into the speech setting. Many people spend time mentally debating with speakers, thereby remaining stuck on one idea in the past while the speaker moves ahead to others. Past feelings you recall from previous encounters with a speaker can color the way you understand the person today. 4. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Preset ideas can get in the way a good listening. You may have heard that the speaker in that particular seminar you’re supposed to attend is a boring lecturer and previous listeners attest that they keep yawning on him, so you entered the class expecting to be bored too. There is nothing wrong with having beliefs and attitudes about topics and people when you’re in an audience, but if you let your feelings and guesses occupy your interest and enthusiasm, you’re likely to miss the important parts of the speeches. Avoid this by becoming an active, engaged listener.
8. Ways on how to improve your listening skills. 1. Maintain eye contact with the instructor. Of course you will need to look at your notebook to write your notes, but eye contact keeps you focused on the job at hand and keeps you involved in the lecture. 2. Focus on content, not delivery. Have you ever counted the number of times a teacher clears his/her throat in a fifteen minute period? If so, you weren't focusing on content. 3. Avoid emotional involvement. When you are too emotionally involved in listening, you tend to hear what you want to hear--not what is actually being said. Try to remain objective and open-minded. 4. Avoid distractions. Don't let your mind wander or be distracted by the person shuffling papers near you. If the classroom is too hot or too cold try to remedy that situation if you can. The solution may require that you dress more appropriately to the room temperature. 5. Treat listening as a challenging mental task. Listening to an academic lecture is not a passive act--at least it shouldn't be. You need to concentrate on what is said so that you can process the information into your notes. 6. Stay active by asking mental questions. Active listening keeps you on your toes. Here are some questions you can ask yourself does this fit with what I know from previous lectures? How is this lecture organized? 7. Use the gap between the rate of speech and your rate of thought. You can think faster than the lecturer can talk. That's one reason your mind may tend to wander. All the above suggestions will help you keep your mind occupied and focused on what being said. You can actually begin to anticipate what the professor is going to say as a way to keep your mind from straying. Your mind does have the capacity to listen, think, write and ponder at the same time, but it does take practice http://www.d.umn.edu/kmc/student/loon/acad/strat/ss_listening.html). lll. Conclusion Communication is extremely important because it allows us to transmit instructions, convey feelings attitudes and cope rationally with problems that besiege us. The most effective communicator develops ways and means that becomes credible and a better giver and sharer of meaning with others. We should remember that no element can be entirely isolated from the rest. With an appreciation and knowledge of these elements, we can proceed rationally to improve our communicative skills. The techniques for listening calls for a deep involvement with the speaker. We must lend our ears with complete attention and thorough concentration. We must shut out the presence of other persons to absorb the substance of what is being said. We should entirely remove the irrelevant noises and sounds. More importantly, we ought to listen logically and analytically. We should form pictures and images of what the speaker is saying. To elevate the listening to an art, there must be total communion with the speaker. There has to be complete rapport in mind and spirit for it to be a meaningful dialogue. Active listening is the most effective types of listening. We should listen with open minds. We can do this by listening purposefully, actively, constructively, therapeutically, and comprehensively. We should use them every time we go to church, when we are at home, in school and in the community. We can ask God to help us to be a good speaker especially in telling the good news of salvation to others and a good listener by reading His words every day. It depends on our choice. May we choose to listen effectively to enjoy life to the fullest.

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