THE PUBLIC LISTENER: A PERSPECTIVE
Hearing and Speech Impairment Resources
Improving Students' Listening Skills
International Listening Association
Student Listening Skills (U. Minn. Duluth)
University Interscholastic Listening Contest
The process through which the listener receives, perceives, attends to, assigns meaning to, and responds to messages is complex. The listener must be actively involved throughout and work to overcome any barriers that may arise during the listening experience. You may want to access the International Listening Association.
2.1 THE IMPORTANCE OF PUBLIC LISTENING
2.2 THE LISTENING PROCESS
Perception
Attention
Paraphrasing
Concentration on the message
The Assignment of Meaning
Response
Question-and-answer sessions
Listening Influencers
credibility
physical presentation
message
organized
tone
channel
Noise
internal variables
experiences
attitudes
modeling
expectation
Memory
2.3 THE PURPOSES OF LISTENING
Discrimination Level
Comprehension Level
Therapeutic Level
Critical Level
To make an assessment of the persuasiveness of the speaker, you should consider what impact the speaker himself/herself is having on you. How effectively do you recognize propaganda techniques?
http://carmen.artsci.washington.edu/propaganda/contents.html,
The critical listener analyzes information to assess the merits or demerits of a particular message. How are news reports of events different from being a live listener?
Appreciation Level
2.4 LISTENING TO SPEECHES
Besides giving indirect feedback to the speaker, the public listener may be asked to make critical judgments about the speech and the speaker following the presentation. In public speaking classes, for instance, students will often be asked to comment on what they feel is effective and what might be improved in a speaker's presentation. Likewise, after presidential debates and speeches by diplomats and other politicians, listeners sometimes offer their views on the speaker's effectiveness. See Grolier's American Presidency.
http://www.grolier.com/presidents/preshome.html
Some useful guidelines for evaluating speeches include:
1. Did the speaker have a worthwhile purpose?
2. Has the speaker made an attempt to be objective and fair to himself or herself, to the audience, and to the subject?
3. Did the speaker know the subject?
4. Had the speaker analyzed the audience?
5. Was the speech structurally sound?
6. Did the speaker utilize effective language?
7. Did the speaker make use of factors of attention and interest in both the content and the delivery of the speech?
8. Did the speaker's supporting materials meet the tests of evidence?
9. How effectively did the speaker make use of the visual aspects of delivery?
10. How effectively did the speaker use his or her voice?
11. Was the speaker a credible spokesperson on the subject?
12. What was the total impression left by the speech?
2.5 IMPROVING LISTENING
Techniques
1. Recognize that both the sender and the receiver share the responsibility for effective communication.
2. Suspend judgments.
3. Be a patient listener.
4. Carefully note your emotional responses to words.
You can work on building your skills by engaging in on-line chat. Perhaps a discussion of politics or some other emotionally charged issue will help you emphasize your best listening skills.
5. Be aware that your posture affects your listening.
6. Make a conscious effort to listen.
7. Control distractions.
8. Concentrate.
A Willingness to Listen
Listening on the Internet
Practice and improve your skills by listening to live or recorded events. As with many links used, these examples require you need to download a program that will make audio and video links work. The plug-in is free and works with most browsers. Downloading may take 15 minutes and you will need to provide information about your computer to install the program for use.
C-SPAN On-line (Capitol Hill).
http://www.audionet.com/radio/tv/c-span/
C-SPAN On-line (Links to recent video events).
House and Senate committee hearings and floor action from Congress.
After reading this chapter you should be able to:
Explain the difference between hearing and listening.
Explain the listening process.
Clarify what influences listening.
List and describe the levels of listening.
Recognize how to listen to speeches.
Understand the techniques for improving listening in the public speaking setting.
Listening is an important part of the communication process. This chapter developed the following points about effective listening:
A great deal of our communication time is devoted to listening.
Hearing is a biological process that involves the reception of a message through sensory channels; it may be affected by all of our senses.
Listening is the active processing of the information we receive.
Listening involves reception, perception, attention, the assignment of meaning, and response by the listener to the message that has been presented.
Auditory acuity enhances an individual's ability to listen efficiently.
Listeners use the visual system as well as the hearing mechanism.
Attention represents the focus on a specific stimulus selected from all the stimuli we receive at any given moment.
Making a summary of the ideas presented, or paraphrasing, can be a helpful technique for sharpening concentration.
Both the interest level and the difficulty of the message affect our listening concentration.
Studies of compressed speech indicate that we can comprehend at a much faster rate than people normally speak.
Putting a stimulus into some predetermined category enables a listener to assign meaning to a message.
Schema are scripts for processing information.
The two hemispheres of the human brain process information differently.
Once we have assigned meaning to a message, we continue the listening process with an internal or an external response (feedback) to that message.
Memory capacity can be increased by choosing to remember, visualizing what is to be remembered, associating the information with something familiar, and practicing with the material.
Listening influencers include the speaker, the message, the channel, noise, internal variables, attitude, memory, and time.
The effective listener receives, perceives, attends to, assigns meaning to, and responds to messages while being influenced by a wide range of factors that enhance or detract from the process at any given time.
There are five levels at which we listen: the discrimination level, the comprehension level, the therapeutic level, the critical level, and the appreciation level.
Inciting words can interrupt good listening.
Listening to speeches requires an understanding of your own response to the public communication and your adaptation of that response to the communication purpose.
hearing
listening
reception
perception
attention
attention span
paraphrasing
assignment of meaning
schema
factual statements
response
discrimination level
comprehension level
therapeutic level
critical level
appreciation level
inciting words
transitions
forecasts of ideas
internal summaries
paralanguage
Write a brief essay in which you consider the listener's perspective regarding the content and context of the inaugural address or a recent speech of President Clinton.
Look up the International Listening Association. What is something at that web site that you could use to improve your listening. Be prepared to discuss in class, online, or in an essay.
For your information, on the Internet you can find transcripts of TV news programs on the major networks since 1968.