Selective Listening

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Selective listening is considered as a negative kind of listening; the selective means that the listener is biased to what he is hearing. The term bias here is based on emotionally difficult communications or preconceived ideas. All in all, selective listening is considered as failing communication sign because by filtering some information one cannot hope to understand. For a child, he or she uses selective listening to identify people, for instance, the child knows that his mother voice is different from his father’s. In addition using selective listening a child chooses to listen to cool sound by focusing his or her attention to a specific sound or spoken words. A noisy environment is not ideal for selective listening. A child who is developing will deteriorate his selective listening when exposed to an environment with unpredictable noises (Singleton & Shulman, 2014).

The suggestion I would make to optimize the child’s ability to listen to speech for him to understand are using listening games and fun activities to promote the listening. Fun activities will help especially in dealing with selective listening where children hear what they want to hear talking to the child all the time will help improve their listening skills here a parent or guardian develops a habit of narrating chores done around the house to the child. Furthermore, when reading stories to the child, one can always stop and ask them what they think will happen and listening to stories together. Some of the games that would help improve a child listening skills to speech include asking the child to name the noise here the child closes the eyes and guesses the sound. Another game is I spy which involves giving clues, then we have a monkey see, monkey hears and monkey do.

Naturalistic observation is a method of research that is usually used by psychologist and it involves observing people in their natural setting. Naturalistic observation, when used on children, will involve observing their behavior without interferences in their natural setting. The benefits are it allows the researcher to see children behavior without having to manipulate the children to act or behave in a particular manner thus; we can say it is ethical. The fact that observation occurs in the natural setting means that it can aid in supporting research external validity. The disadvantages of naturalistic observation are the children know they are being watched which makes them behave differently and act friendly. Moreover, the children might try conforming to the behavior they think the researcher want to see. The difference of opinion might also be an issue whereby two observers gives totally different conclusion from the same observation.

Reference

Singleton, N. C., & Shulman, B. B. (2014). Language development: Foundations, processes, and clinical applications. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.