critical listening assignment

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15 Critical Listening

Learning objectives.

• Understand the differences between listening and hearing.
• Explain the benefits of listening.
• Understand the types of noise that can affect a listener’s ability to attend to a message.
• Define and explain critical listening and its importance in the public speaking context.
• Understand ways to improve your ability to critically listen to speeches.

Zach Graves – The Importance of Listening – CC BY-SA 2.0.

“Are you listening to me?” Often this question is asked because the speaker thinks the listener is nodding off or daydreaming. We sometimes think that listening means we only have to sit back, stay barely awake, and let a speaker’s words wash over us. While many Americans look upon being active as something to admire, to engage in, and to excel at, listening is thought of as a “passive” activity. More recently, O, the Oprah Magazine featured a cover article with the title, “How to Talk So People Really Listen: Four Ways to Make Yourself Heard.” This title leads us to expect a list of ways to leave the listening to others and insist that they do so, but the article contains a surprise ending. The final piece of advice is this: “You can’t go wrong by showing interest in what other people say and making them feel important. In other words, the better you listen, the more you’ll be listened to” (Jarvis, 2009).

You may have heard the adage, “We have two ears but only one mouth.” This saying reminds us that listening can be twice as important as talking. As a student, you most likely spend many hours in a classroom doing a significant amount of focused listening. Sometimes it is difficult to apply those efforts to communication in other areas of your life. As a result, your listening skills may not be all they could be. In this chapter, we will examine listening versus hearing, listening styles, listening difficulties, listening stages, and listening critically.

Listening vs. Hearing

Kimba Howard – megaphone – CC BY 2.0.

Listening or Hearing

Hearing is an accidental and automatic brain response to sound that requires no effort. We are surrounded by sounds most of the time. For example, we are accustomed to the sounds of airplanes, lawn mowers, furnace blowers, the rattling of pots and pans, and so on. We hear those incidental sounds and, unless we have a reason to do otherwise, we train ourselves to ignore them. We learn to filter out sounds that mean little to us, just as we choose to hear our ringing cell phones and other sounds that are more important to us.

Listening, on the other hand, is purposeful and focused rather than accidental. As a result, it requires motivation and effort. Listening , at its best, is active, focused, and concentrated attention for the purpose of understanding the meanings expressed by a speaker. We are not always the best listeners. Later in this chapter, we will examine some of the reasons why and some strategies for becoming more active critical listeners.

Hearing is an accidental and automatic brain response to sound that requires no effort.

Listening is active, focused, and concentrated attention for the purpose of understanding the meanings expressed by a speaker.

Benefits of Listening

Try not to take listening for granted. Before the invention of writing, people conveyed virtually all knowledge through some combination of showing and telling. Elders recited tribal histories to attentive audiences. Listeners received religious teachings enthusiastically. Myths, legends, folktales, and stories for entertainment only survived because audiences were eager to listen. Nowadays, however, you can gain information and entertainment through reading and electronic recordings rather than through real-time listening. If you become distracted and let your attention wander, you can go back and replay a recording. Despite that fact, you can still gain at least four compelling benefits by becoming more active and competent at real-time listening.

You Become a Better Student

When you focus on the material presented in a classroom, you will be able to identify the words used in a lecture and the way they were emphasized. Listening instead of hearing will help you understand the more complex meanings of the words said in a lecture. You will take better notes, and you will more accurately remember the instructor’s claims, information, and conclusions. Many times, instructors give verbal cues about what information is important, specific expectations about assignments, and even what material is likely to be on an exam, so careful listening can be beneficial.

You Become a Better Friend

When you give your best attention to people expressing thoughts and experiences that are important to them, those individuals are likely to see you as someone who cares about their well-being. This fact is especially true when you give your attention only and refrain from interjecting opinions, judgments, and advice.

People Will Perceive You as Intelligent and Perceptive

When you listen well to others, you reveal yourself as being curious and interested in people and events. Also, your ability to understand the meanings of what you hear will make you a more knowledgeable and thoughtful person.

Good Listening Can Help Your Public Speaking

When you listen well to others, you start to pick up more on the stylistic components related to how people form arguments and present information. As a result, you can analyze what you think works and doesn’t work in others’ speeches, which can help you transform your speeches in the process. For example, paying attention to how others cite sources orally during their speeches may give you ideas about how to more effectively cite sources in your presentation.

Listening Styles

John Benson – Listening Styles – CC BY 2.0.

If listening were easy, and if all people went about it in the same way, the task for a public speaker would be much easier. Even Aristotle, as long ago as 325 BC, recognized that listeners in his audience were varied in listening style . He differentiated them as follows:

Rhetoric falls into three divisions, determined by the three classes of listeners to speeches. For of the three elements in speech-making—speaker, subject, and person addressed—it is the last one, the hearer, that determines the speech’s end and object. The hearer must be either a judge, with a decision to make about things past or future, or an observer. A member of the assembly decides about future events, a juryman about past events: while those who merely decide on the orator’s skill are observers (Aristotle, c. 350 BCE).

Thus, Aristotle classified listeners into those who would be using the speech to make decisions about past events, those who would make decisions affecting the future, and those who would evaluate the speaker’s skills. This is all the more remarkable when we consider that Aristotle’s audiences were composed exclusively of male citizens of one city-state, all prosperous property owners.

Our audiences today are likely to be much more heterogeneous. Think about the classroom audience that will listen to your speeches in this course. Your classmates come from many religious and ethnic backgrounds. Some of them may speak English as a second language. Some might be survivors of war-torn parts of the world such as Bosnia, Darfur, or northwest China. Being mindful of such differences will help you prepare a speech in which you minimize the potential for misunderstanding.

Listening style is the way an audience member listens to the speech.

Part of the potential for misunderstanding is the difference in listening styles. In an article in the International Journal of Listening , Watson, Barker, and Weaver (Watson, et al., 1995) identified four listening styles: people, action, content, and time.

The people-oriented listener is interested in the speaker. People-oriented listeners listen to the message in order to learn how the speaker thinks and how they feel about their message. For instance, when people-oriented listeners listen to an interview with a famous rap artist, they are likely to be more curious about the artist as an individual than about music, even though the people-oriented listener might also appreciate the artist’s work. If you are a people-oriented listener, you might have certain questions you hope will be answered, such as: Does the artist feel successful? What’s it like to be famous? What kind of educational background does he or she have? In the same way, if we’re listening to a doctor who responded to the earthquake crisis in Haiti, we might be more interested in the doctor as a person than in the state of affairs for Haitians. Why did he or she go to Haiti? How did he or she get away from his or her normal practice and patients? How many lives did he or she save? We might be less interested in the equally important and urgent needs for food, shelter, and sanitation following the earthquake.

The people-oriented listener is likely to be more attentive to the speaker than to the message. If you tend to be such a listener, understand that the message is about what is important to the speaker.

Action-oriented listeners are primarily interested in finding out what the speaker wants. Does the speaker want votes, donations, volunteers, or something else? It’s sometimes difficult for an action-oriented speaker to listen through the descriptions, evidence, and explanations with which a speaker builds his or her case.

Action-oriented listening is sometimes called task-oriented listening. In it, the listener seeks a clear message about what needs to be done and might have less patience for listening to the reasons behind the task. This can be especially true if the reasons are complicated. For example, when you’re a passenger on an airplane waiting to push back from the gate, a flight attendant delivers a brief speech called the preflight safety briefing. The flight attendant does not read the findings of a safety study or the regulations about seat belts. The flight attendant doesn’t explain that the content of his or her speech is actually mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration. Instead, the attendant says only to buckle up so we can leave. An action-oriented listener finds “buckling up” a more compelling message than a message about the underlying reasons.

Content-oriented listeners are interested in the message itself, whether it makes sense, what it means, and whether it’s accurate. When you give a speech, many members of your classroom audience will be content-oriented listeners who will be interested in learning from you. You, therefore, have an obligation to represent the truth in the fullest way you can. You can emphasize an idea, but if you exaggerate, you could lose credibility in the minds of your content-oriented audience. You can advocate ideas that are important to you, but if you omit important limitations, you are withholding part of the truth and could leave your audience with an inaccurate view.

Imagine you’re delivering a speech on the plight of orphans in Africa. If you just talk about the fact that there are over forty-five million orphans in Africa but don’t explain why you’ll sound like an infomercial. In such an instance, your audience’s response is likely to be less enthusiastic than you might want. Instead, content-oriented listeners want to listen to well-developed information with solid explanations.

People who are  time-oriented listeners   prefer a message that gets to the point quickly. Time-oriented listeners can become impatient with slow delivery or lengthy explanations. This kind of listener may be receptive for only a brief amount of time and may become rude or even hostile if the speaker expects a longer focus of attention. Time-oriented listeners convey their impatience through eye rolling, shifting about in their seats, checking their cell phones, and other inappropriate behaviors. If you’ve been asked to speak to a group of middle-school students, you need to realize that their attention spans are simply not as long as those of college students. This is an important reason speeches to young audiences must be shorter or broken up by more variety than speeches to adults.

In your professional future, some of your audience members will have real-time constraints, not merely perceived ones. Imagine that you’ve been asked to deliver a speech on a new project to the board of directors of a local corporation. Chances are the people on the board of directors are all pressed for time. If your speech is long and filled with overly detailed information, time-oriented listeners will simply start to tune you out as you’re speaking. Obviously, if time-oriented listeners start tuning you out, they will not be listening to your message. This is not the same thing as being a time-oriented listener who might be less interested in the message content than in its length.

Types of Listeners

The people-oriented listener is interested in the speaker.

The action-oriented listener is primarily interested in finding out what the speaker wants.

The content-oriented listener  is interested in the message itself, whether it makes sense, what it means, and whether it’s accurate.

The time-oriented listener prefers a message that gets to the point quickly.

Why Listening Is Difficult

Ian T. McFarland – Listen – CC BY-SA 2.0.

At times, everyone has difficulty staying completely focused during a lengthy presentation. We can sometimes have difficulty listening to even relatively brief messages. Some of the factors that interfere with good listening might exist beyond our control, but others are manageable. It’s helpful to be aware of these factors so that they interfere as little as possible with understanding the message.

Noise is one of the biggest factors to interfere with listening. Noise can be defined as anything that interferes with your ability to attend to and understand a message. There are many kinds of noise, but we will focus on only the four you are most likely to encounter in public speaking situations: physical noise, psychological noise, physiological noise, and semantic noise.

Physical Noise

Physical noise   consists of various sounds in an environment that interfere with a source’s ability to hear. Construction noises right outside a window, planes flying directly overhead, or loud music in the next room can make it difficult to hear the message being presented by a speaker even if a microphone is being used. It is sometimes possible to manage the context to reduce the noise. Closing a window might be helpful. Asking the people in the next room to turn their music down might be possible. Changing to a new location is more difficult, as it involves finding a new location and having everyone get there.

Psychological Noise

Psychological noise consists of distractions to a speaker’s message caused by a receiver’s internal thoughts. For example, if you are preoccupied with personal problems, it is difficult to give your full attention to understanding the meanings of a message. The presence of another person to whom you feel attracted, or perhaps a person you dislike intensely, can also be psychosocial noise that draws your attention away from the message.

Physiological Noise

Physiological noise consists of distractions to a speaker’s message caused by a listener’s own body. Maybe you’re listening to a speech in class around noon and you haven’t eaten anything. Your stomach may be growling and your desk is starting to look tasty. Maybe the room is cold and you’re thinking more about how to keep warm than about what the speaker is saying. In either case, your body can distract you from attending to the information being presented.

Semantic Noise

Semantic noise occurs when a receiver experiences confusion over the meaning of a source’s word choice. While you are attempting to understand a particular word or phrase, the speaker continues to present the message. While you are struggling with a word interpretation, you are distracted from listening to the rest of the message. One of the authors was listening to a speaker who mentioned using a sweeper to clean carpeting. The author was confused, as she did not see how a broom would be effective in cleaning carpeting. Later, the author found out that the speaker was using the word “sweeper” to refer to a vacuum cleaner; however, in the meantime, her listening was hurt by her inability to understand what the speaker meant. Another example of semantic noise is the euphemism. Euphemism is diplomatic language used for delivering unpleasant information. For instance, if someone is said to be “flexible with the truth,” it might take us a moment to understand that the speaker means this person sometimes lies.

  Noise can be defined as anything that interferes with your ability to attend to and understand a message.

Physical noise consists of various sounds in an environment that interfere with a source’s ability to hear.

Psychological noise consists of distractions to a speaker’s message caused by a receiver’s internal thoughts.

Physiological noise consists of distractions to a speaker’s message caused by a listener’s own body.

Semantic noise occurs when a receiver experiences confusion over the meaning of a source’s word choice.

Examples of Noise

Many distractions are not the fault of the listener or the speaker. However, when you are the speaker, being aware of these sources of noise , or distractions that keep a person from listening, can help you reduce some of the noise that interferes with your audience’s ability to understand you.

Attention Span

A person can only maintain focused attention for a finite length of time. In his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business , New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education professor Neil Postman argued that modern audiences have lost the ability to sustain attention to a message (Postman, 1985). More recently, researchers have engaged in an ongoing debate over whether Internet use is detrimental to attention span (Carr, 2010). Whether or not these concerns are well founded, you have probably noticed that even when your attention is “glued” to something in which you are deeply interested, every now and then you pause to do something else, such as getting a drink of water, stretching, or looking out the window.

The limits of the human attention span can interfere with listening, but listeners and speakers can use strategies to prevent this interference. As many classroom instructors know, listeners will readily renew their attention when the presentation includes frequent breaks in pacing (Middendorf & Kalish, 1996). For example, a fifty- to seventy-five-minute class session might include some lecture material alternated with questions for class discussion, video clips, handouts, and demonstrations. Instructors who are adept at holding listeners’ attention also move about the front of the room, writing on the board, drawing diagrams, and intermittently using slide transparencies or PowerPoint slides.

If you have instructors who do a good job of keeping your attention, they are positive role models showing strategies you can use to accommodate the limitations of your audience’s attention span.

Receiver Biases

Good listening involves keeping an open mind and withholding judgment until the speaker has completed the message. Conversely, biased listening is characterized by jumping to conclusions; the biased listener believes, “I don’t need to listen because I already know what I think.” Reciever bias can refer to two things: biases with reference to the speaker and preconceived ideas and opinions about the topic or message. Both can be considered noise. Everyone has biases, but good listeners have learned to hold them in check while listening.

The first type of bias listeners can have is related to the speaker. Often a speaker stands up and an audience member simply doesn’t like the speaker, so the audience member may not listen to the speaker’s message. Maybe you have a classmate who just gets under your skin for some reason, or maybe you question a classmate’s competence on a given topic. When we have preconceived notions about a speaker, those biases can interfere with our ability to listen accurately and competently to the speaker’s message.

The second type of bias listeners can have is related to the topic or content of the speech. Maybe the speech topic is one you’ve heard a thousand times, so you just tune out the speech. Or maybe the speaker is presenting a topic or position you fundamentally disagree with. When listeners have strong preexisting opinions about a topic, such as the death penalty, religious issues, affirmative action, abortion, or global warming, their biases may make it difficult for them to even consider new information about the topic, especially if the new information is inconsistent with what they already believe to be true. As listeners, we have difficulty identifying our biases, especially when they seem to make sense. However, it is worth recognizing that our lives would be very difficult if no one ever considered new points of view or new information. We live in a world where everyone can benefit from clear thinking and open-minded listening.

Listening or Receiver Apprehension

Listening or receiver apprehension is the fear that you might be unable to understand the message or process the information correctly or be able to adapt your thinking to include the new information coherently (Wheeless, 1975). In some situations, you might worry that the information presented will be “over your head”—too complex, technical, or advanced for you to understand adequately.

Many students will actually avoid registering for courses in which they feel certain they will do poorly. In other cases, students will choose to take a challenging course only if it’s a requirement. This avoidance might be understandable but is not a good strategy for success. To become educated people, students should take a few courses that can shed light on areas where their knowledge is limited.

As a speaker, you can reduce listener apprehension by defining terms clearly and using simple visual aids to hold the audience’s attention. You don’t want to underestimate or overestimate your audience’s knowledge on a subject, so good audience analysis is always important. If you know your audience doesn’t have special knowledge on a given topic, you should start by defining important terms. Research has shown us that when listeners do not feel they understand a speaker’s message, their apprehension about receiving the message escalates. Imagine that you are listening to a speech about chemistry and the speaker begins talking about “colligative properties.” You may start questioning whether you’re even in the right place. When this happens, apprehension clearly interferes with a listener’s ability to accurately and competently understand a speaker’s message. As a speaker, you can lessen the listener’s apprehension by explaining that colligative properties focus on how much is dissolved in a solution, not on what is dissolved in a solution. You could also give an example that they might readily understand, such as saying that it doesn’t matter what kind of salt you use in the winter to melt ice on your driveway, what is important is how much salt you use.

Sources of noise , or distractions that keep a person from listening, include attention span, receiver bias, and listening or receiver apprehension.

Stages of Listening

Figure 3: Stages of Feedback

As you read earlier, there are many factors that can interfere with listening, so you need to be able to manage a number of mental tasks at the same time in order to be a successful listener. Author Joseph DeVito has divided the listening process into five stages: receiving, understanding, remembering, evaluating, and responding (DeVito, 2000).

Receiving is the intentional focus on hearing a speaker’s message, which happens when we filter out other sources so that we can isolate the message and avoid the confusing mixture of incoming stimuli. At this stage, we are still only hearing the message. Notice in Figure 3: Stages of Feedback that this stage is represented by the ear because it is the primary tool involved with this stage of the listening process.

One of the authors of this book recalls attending a political rally for a presidential candidate at which about five thousand people were crowded into an outdoor amphitheater. When the candidate finally started speaking, the cheering and yelling was so loud that the candidate couldn’t be heard easily despite using a speaker system. In this example, our coauthor had difficulty receiving the message because of the external noise. This is only one example of the ways that hearing alone can require sincere effort, but you must hear the message before you can continue the process of listening.

Understanding

In the understanding stage, we attempt to learn the meaning of the message, which is not always easy. For one thing, if a speaker does not enunciate clearly, it may be difficult to tell what the message was—did your friend say, “I think she’ll be late for class,” or “my teacher delayed the class”? Notice in Figure 3:  Stages of Feedback that stages two, three, and four are represented by the brain because it is the primary tool involved with these stages of the listening process.

Even when we have understood the words in a message, because of the differences in our backgrounds and experience, we sometimes make the mistake of attaching our own meanings to the words of others. For example, say you have made plans with your friends to meet at a certain movie theater, but you arrive and nobody else shows up. Eventually, you find out that your friends are at a different theater all the way across town where the same movie is playing. Everyone else understood that the meeting place was the “west side” location, but you wrongly understood it as the “east side” location and therefore missed out on part of the fun.

The consequences of ineffective listening in a classroom can be much worse. When your professor advises students to get an “early start” on your speech, he or she probably hopes that you will begin your research right away and move on to developing a thesis statement and outlining the speech as soon as possible. However, students in your class might misunderstand the instructor’s meaning in several ways. One student might interpret the advice to mean that as long as she gets started, the rest of the assignment will have time to develop itself. Another student might instead think that to start early is to start on the Friday before the Monday due date instead of Sunday night.

So much of the way we understand others is influenced by our own perceptions and experiences. Therefore, at the understanding stage of listening, we should be on the lookout for places where our perceptions might differ from those of the speaker.

Remembering

Remembering begins with listening; if you can’t remember something that was said, you might not have been listening effectively. Wolvin and Coakley note that the most common reason for not remembering a message after the fact is because it wasn’t really learned in the first place (Wolvin & Coakley, 1996). However, even when you are listening attentively, some messages are more difficult than others to understand and remember. Highly complex messages that are filled with detail call for highly developed listening skills. Moreover, if something distracts your attention even for a moment, you could miss out on information that explains other new concepts you hear when you begin to listen fully again.

It’s also important to know that you can improve your memory of a message by processing it meaningfully—that is, by applying it in ways that are meaningful to you (Gluck, et al., 2008). Instead of simply repeating a new acquaintance’s name over and over, for example, you might remember it by associating it with something in your own life. “Emily,” you might say, “reminds me of the Emily I knew in middle school,” or “Mr. Impiari’s name reminds me of the Impala my father drives.”

Finally, if understanding has been inaccurate, recollection of the message will be inaccurate too.

The fourth stage in the listening process is evaluating or judging the value of the message. We might be thinking, “This makes sense” or, conversely, “This is very odd.” Because everyone embodies biases and perspectives learned from widely diverse sets of life experiences, evaluations of the same message can vary widely from one listener to another. Even the most open-minded listeners will have opinions of a speaker, and those opinions will influence how the message is evaluated. People are more likely to evaluate a message positively if the speaker speaks clearly, presents ideas logically, and gives reasons to support the points made.

Unfortunately, personal opinions sometimes result in prejudiced evaluations. Imagine you’re listening to a speech given by someone from another country and this person has an accent that is hard to understand. You may have a hard time simply making out the speaker’s message. Some people find a foreign accent to be interesting or even exotic, while others find it annoying or even take it as a sign of ignorance. If a listener has a strong bias against foreign accents, the listener may not even attempt to attend to the message. If you mistrust a speaker because of an accent, you could be rejecting important or personally enriching information. Good listeners have learned to refrain from making these judgments and instead to focus on the speaker’s meanings.

Responding ,  sometimes referred to as feedback, is the fifth and final stage of the listening process. It’s the stage at which you indicate your involvement. Almost anything you do at this stage can be interpreted as feedback. For example, you are giving positive feedback to your instructor if at the end of class you stay behind to finish a sentence in your notes or approach the instructor to ask for clarification. The opposite kind of feedback is given by students who gather their belongings and rush out the door as soon as class is over. Notice in Figure 3: Stages of Feedback that this stage is represented by the lips because we often give feedback in the form of verbal feedback; however, you can just as easily respond nonverbally.  

Stages of Feedback

Receiving is the stage where you intentionally focus on hearing a speaker’s message. This focus happens when you filter out other sources so that you can isolate the message and avoid the confusing mixture of incoming stimuli.

Understanding is the stage where we attempt to learn the meaning of the message.

Remembering is the stage that begins with listening. If you can’t remember something that was said, you might not have been listening effectively.

Evaluating is the stage where we judge the value of the message.

Responding is the stage where you give the speaker feedback.

Formative Feedback

Not all response occurs at the end of the message. Formative feedback is a natural part of the ongoing transaction between a speaker and a listener. As the speaker delivers the message, a listener signals their involvement with focused attention, note-taking, nodding, and other behaviors that indicate understanding or failure to understand the message. These signals are important to the speaker, who is interested in whether the message is clear and accepted or whether the content of the message is meeting the resistance of preconceived ideas. Speakers can use this feedback to decide whether additional examples, support materials, or explanation is needed.

Summative Feedback

Summative feedback is given at the end of the communication. When you attend a political rally, a presentation given by a speaker you admire, or even a class, there are verbal and nonverbal ways of indicating your appreciation for or your disagreement with the messages or the speakers at the end of the message. Maybe you’ll stand up and applaud a speaker you agreed with or just sit staring in silence after listening to a speaker you didn’t like. In other cases, a speaker may be attempting to persuade you to donate to a charity, so if the speaker passes a bucket and you make a donation, you are providing feedback on the speaker’s effectiveness. At the same time, we do not always listen most carefully to the messages of speakers we admire. Sometimes we simply enjoy being in their presence, and our summative feedback is not about the message but about our attitudes about the speaker. If your feedback is limited to something like, “I just love your voice,” you might be indicating that you did not listen carefully to the content of the message.

There is little doubt that by now, you are beginning to understand the complexity of listening and the great potential for errors. By becoming aware of what is involved with active listening and where difficulties might lie, you can prepare yourself both as a listener and as a speaker to minimize listening errors with your own public speeches.

Formative feedback is a natural part of the ongoing transaction between a speaker and a listener during the speech (note taking, nodding, smiling, etc.).

Summative feedback is given at the end of the communication (asking questions, peer reviewing, etc).

Listening Critically

Kizzzbeth – Good Listener – CC BY-SA 2.0.

As a student, you are exposed to many kinds of messages. You receive messages conveying academic information, institutional rules, instructions, and warnings; you also receive messages through political discourse, advertisements, gossip, jokes, song lyrics, text messages, invitations, web links, and all other manners of communication. You know it’s not all the same, but it isn’t always clear how to separate the truth from the messages that are misleading or even blatantly false. Nor is it always clear which messages are intended to help the listener and which ones are merely self-serving for the speaker. Part of being a good listener is to learn when to use caution in evaluating the messages we hear.

Critical listening , in a public speaking context, means using careful, systematic thinking and reasoning to see whether a message makes sense in light of factual evidence. Critical listening can be learned with practice but is not necessarily easy to do. Some people never learn this skill; instead, they take every message at face value even when those messages are in conflict with their knowledge. Problems occur when messages are repeated to others who have not yet developed the skills to discern the difference between a valid message and a mistaken one. Critical listening can be particularly difficult when the message is complex. Unfortunately, some speakers may make their messages intentionally complex to avoid critical scrutiny. For example, a city treasurer giving a budget presentation might use very large words and technical jargon, which make it difficult for listeners to understand the proposed budget and ask probing questions.

Critical listening, in a public speaking context, means using careful, systematic thinking and reasoning to see whether a message makes sense in light of factual evidence.

Six Ways to Improve Your Critical Listening

Critical listening is first and foremost a skill that can be learned and improved. In this section, we are going to explore six different techniques you can use to become a more critical listener.

Recognizing the Difference between Facts and Opinions

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan is credited with saying, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts” (Wikiquote). Part of critical listening is learning to separate opinions from facts, and this works two ways: critical listeners are aware of whether a speaker is delivering a factual message or a message based on opinion, and they are also aware of the interplay between their own opinions and facts as they listen to messages.

In American politics, the issue of health care reform is heavily laden with both opinions and facts, and it is extremely difficult to sort some of them out. A clash of fact versus opinion happened on September 9, 2010, during President Obama’s nationally televised speech to a joint session of Congress outlining his health care reform plan. In this speech, President Obama responded to several rumors about the plan, including the claim “that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false—the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.” At this point, one congressman yelled out, “You lie!” Clearly, this congressman did not have a very high opinion of either the health care reform plan or the president. However, when the nonpartisan watch group Factcheck.org examined the language of the proposed bill, they found that it had a section titled “No Federal Payment for Undocumented Aliens” (Factcheck.org, 2009).

Often when people have a negative opinion about a topic, they are unwilling to accept facts. Instead, they question all aspects of the speech and have a negative predisposition toward both the speech and the speaker.

This is not to say that speakers should not express their opinions. Many of the greatest speeches in history include personal opinions. Consider, for example, Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, in which he expressed his personal wish for the future of American society. Critical listeners may agree or disagree with a speaker’s opinions, but the point is that they know when a message they are hearing is based on opinion and when it is factual.

Uncovering Assumptions

If something is factual , supporting evidence exists. However, we still need to be careful about what evidence does and does not mean. Assumptions are gaps in a logical sequence that listeners passively fill with their own ideas and opinions and may or may not be accurate. When listening to a public speech, you may find yourself being asked to assume something is a fact when in reality many people question that fact. For example, suppose you’re listening to a speech on weight loss. The speaker talks about how people who are overweight are simply not motivated or lack the self-discipline to lose weight. The speaker has built the speech on the assumption that motivation and self-discipline are the only reasons why people can’t lose weight. You may think to yourself, what about genetics? By listening critically, you will be more likely to notice unwarranted assumptions in a speech, which may prompt you to question the speaker if questions are taken or to do further research to examine the validity of the speaker’s assumptions. If, however, you sit passively by and let the speaker’s assumptions go unchallenged, you may find yourself persuaded by information that is not factual.

Factual means supporting evidence exists.

Assumptions are gaps in a logical sequence that listeners passively fill with their own ideas and opinions and may or may not be accurate.

When you listen critically to a speech, you might hear information that appears unsupported by evidence. You shouldn’t accept that information unconditionally. You would accept it under the condition that the speaker offers credible evidence that directly supports it.

Facts vs. Assumptions

Be Open to New Ideas

Sometimes people are so fully invested in their perceptions of the world that they are unable to listen receptively to messages that make sense and would be of great benefit to them. Human progress has been possible, sometimes against great odds, because of the mental curiosity and discernment of a few people. In the late 1700s when the technique of vaccination to prevent smallpox was introduced, it was opposed by both medical professionals and everyday citizens who staged public protests (Edward Jenner Museum). More than two centuries later, vaccinations against smallpox, diphtheria, polio, and other infectious diseases have saved countless lives, yet popular opposition continues.

In the world of public speaking, we must be open to new ideas. Let’s face it, people have a tendency to filter out information they disagree with and to filter in information that supports what they already believe. Nicolaus Copernicus was a sixteenth-century astronomer who dared to publish a treatise explaining that the earth revolves around the sun, which was a violation of Catholic doctrine. Copernicus’s astronomical findings were labeled heretical and his treatise banned because a group of people at the time were not open to new ideas. In May of 2010, almost five hundred years after his death, the Roman Catholic Church admitted its error and reburied his remains with the full rites of Catholic burial (Owen, 2010).

While the Copernicus case is a fairly dramatic reversal, listeners should always be open to new ideas. We are not suggesting that you have to agree with every idea that you are faced with in life; rather, we are suggesting that you at least listen to the message and then evaluate the message.

Relate New Ideas to Old Ones

As both a speaker and a listener, one of the most important things you can do to understand a message is to relate new ideas to previously held ideas. Imagine you’re giving a speech about biological systems and you need to use the term “homeostasis,” which refers to the ability of an organism to maintain stability by making constant adjustments. To help your audience understand homeostasis, you could show how homeostasis is similar to adjustments made by the thermostats that keep our homes at a more or less even temperature. If you set your thermostat for seventy degrees and it gets hotter, the central cooling will kick in and cool your house down. If your house gets below seventy degrees, your heater will kick in and heat your house up. Notice that in both cases your thermostat is making constant adjustments to stay at seventy degrees. Explaining that the body’s homeostasis works in a similar way will make it more relevant to your listeners and will likely help them both understand and remember the idea because it links to something they have already experienced.

If you can make effective comparisons while you are listening, it can deepen your understanding of the message. If you can provide those comparisons for your listeners, you make it easier for them to give consideration to your ideas.

Note-taking is a skill that improves with practice. You already know that it’s nearly impossible to write down everything a speaker says. In fact, in your attempt to record everything, you might fall behind and wish you had divided your attention differently between writing and listening.

Careful, selective note-taking is important because we want an accurate record that reflects the meanings of the message. However much you might concentrate on the notes, you could inadvertently leave out an important word, such as not , and undermine the reliability of your otherwise carefully written notes. Instead, if you give the same care and attention to listening, you are less likely to make that kind of a mistake.

It’s important to find a balance between listening well and taking good notes. Many people struggle with this balance for a long time. For example, if you try to write down only key phrases instead of full sentences, you might find that you can’t remember how two ideas were related. In that case, too few notes were taken. At the opposite end, extensive note-taking can result in a loss of emphasis on the most important ideas.

To increase your critical listening skills, continue developing your ability to identify the central issues in messages so that you can take accurate notes that represent the meanings intended by the speaker.

Listening Ethically

Ben Smith – String telephone – CC BY-SA 2.0.

Ethical listening rests heavily on honest intentions. We should extend to other speakers the same respect we want to receive when it’s our turn to speak. We should be facing the speaker with our eyes open. We should not be checking our cell phones. We should avoid any behavior that belittles the speaker or the message.

Scholars Stephanie Coopman and James Lull emphasize the creation of a climate of caring and mutual understanding, observing that “respecting others’ perspectives is one hallmark of the effective listener” (Coopman & Lull, 2008). Respect, or unconditional positive regard for others, means that you treat others with consideration and decency whether you agree with them or not. Professors Sprague, Stuart, and Bodary (Sprague, et al., 2010). also urge us to treat the speaker with respect even when we disagree, don’t understand the message, or find the speech boring.

Doug Lippman (1998) (Lippman, 1998), a storytelling coach, wrote powerfully and sensitively about listening in his book:

Like so many of us, I used to take listening for granted, glossing over this step as I rushed into the more active, visible ways of being helpful. Now, I am convinced that listening is the single most important element of any helping relationship. Listening has great power. It draws thoughts and feelings out of people as nothing else can. When someone listens to you well, you become aware of feelings you may not have realized that you felt. You have ideas you may have never thought before. You become more eloquent, more insightful.… As a helpful listener, I do not interrupt you. I do not give advice. I do not do something else while listening to you. I do not convey distraction through nervous mannerisms. I do not finish your sentences for you. In spite of all my attempts to understand you, I do not assume I know what you mean. I do not convey disapproval, impatience, or condescension. If I am confused, I show a desire for clarification, not dislike for your obtuseness. I do not act vindicated when you misspeak or correct yourself. I do not sit impassively, withholding participation. Instead, I project affection, approval, interest, and enthusiasm. I am your partner in communication. I am eager for your imminent success, fascinated by your struggles, forgiving of your mistakes, always expecting the best. I am your delighted listener (Lippman, 1998).

This excerpt expresses the decency with which people should treat each other. It doesn’t mean we must accept everything we hear, but ethically, we should refrain from trivializing each other’s concerns. We have all had the painful experience of being ignored or misunderstood. This is how we know that one of the greatest gifts one human can give to another is listening.

Ethical listening is a concept that rests heavily on honest intentions. It is when we extend to other speakers the same respect we want to receive when it’s our turn to speak.

Aristotle. (c. 350 BCE). Rhetoric (W. Rhys Roberts, Trans.). Book I, Part 3, para. 1. Retrieved from http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/rhetoric.1.i.html .

Carr, N. (2010, May 24). The Web shatters focus, rewires brains.  Wired Magazine . Retrieved from  http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_nicholas_carr/all/1 .

Coopman, S. J., & Lull, J. (2008).  Public speaking: The evolving art . Cengage Learning, p. 60.

DeVito, J. A. (2000).  The elements of public speaking  (7th ed.). New York, NY: Longman.

Edward Jenner Museum. (n.d.). Vaccination. Retrieved from  http://www.jennermuseum.com/Jenner/vaccination.html

Factcheck.org, a Project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. (2009, September 10). Obama’s health care speech. Retrieved from  http://www.factcheck.org/2009/09/obamas-health-care-speech

Gluck, M. A., Mercado, E., & Myers, C. E. (2008).  Learning and memory: From brain to behavior . New York: Worth Publishers, pp. 172–173.

Jarvis, T. (2009, November). How to talk so people really listen: Four ways to make yourself heard. O, the Oprah Magazine . Retrieved from http://www.oprah.com/relationships/Communication-Skills-How-to-Make-Yourself-Heard

Lippman, D. (1998).  The storytelling coach: How to listen, praise, and bring out people’s best . Little Rock, AR: August House.

Middendorf, J., & Kalish, A. (1996). The “change-up” in lectures.  The National Teaching and Learning Forum ,  5 (2).

Owen, R. (2010, May 23). Catholic church reburies “heretic” Nicolaus Copernicus with honour.  Times Online . Retrieved from  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article7134341.ece

Postman, N. (1985).  Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business . New York: Viking Press.

Sprague, J., Stuart, D., & Bodary, D. (2010).  The speaker’s handbook  (9th ed.). Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage.

Watson, K. W., Barker, L. L., & Weaver, J. B., III. (1995). The listening styles profile (LSP-16): Development and validation of an instrument to assess four listening styles.  International Journal of Listening ,  9 , 1–13.

Wheeless, L. R. (1975). An investigation of receiver apprehension and social context dimensions of communication apprehension. Speech Teacher , 24 , 261–268.

Wikiquote. (n.d.). Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Retrieved from  http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Daniel_Patrick_Moynihan

Wolvin, A., & Coakley, C. G. (1996). Listening (5th ed.). Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill.

Stand up, Speak out Copyright © 2017 by Josh Miller; Marnie Lawler-Mcdonough; Megan Orcholski; Kristin Woodward; Lisa Roth; and Emily Mueller is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Critical Listening Exercises Get our tips on how to use Listenwise's multimodal lessons to teach listening skills to ESL/ELL students. Perfect for English learners at all levels. /*! elementor - v3.23.0 - 05-08-2024 */ .elementor-widget-image{text-align:center}.elementor-widget-image a{display:inline-block}.elementor-widget-image a img[src$=".svg"]{width:48px}.elementor-widget-image img{vertical-align:middle;display:inline-block} What is critical listening? What is strategic listening? How is listening connected to critical thinking? And how can teachers improve their students’ listening, speaking, and critical thinking through listening skills exercises? Categories Blog Critical Listening Exercises

What is critical listening? What is strategic listening? How is listening connected to critical thinking? And how can teachers improve their students’ listening, speaking, and critical thinking through listening skills exercises?

• Post author By lstadmin
• Post date May 29, 2022

Critical listening and strategic listening are vital pieces to building  active listening comprehension  – and are especially crucial to both success on listening exams and in the classroom, generally. Strategic listening asks students to listen to identify and process what they’ve heard, while critical listening asks the listener not only for comprehension of the message but also for evaluation.

Using critical thinking in listening might include analyzing a message to identify gaps in logic and reasoning, identifying and analyzing speaker bias, distinguishing between fact and opinion, and detecting propaganda techniques.

Why is teaching critical listening so challenging?

Haroutunian-Gordan’s (2011)  identified  four interrelated elements of listening  (the listener’s goal, the situation, the role the listener takes, and the relationship between the speaker and listener), and there can often be a disconnect between teachers’ expectations and students’ beliefs about each.

Consider this pairing during a whole-class discussion:

Even though we tend to believe that listening is one of the most important foundational skills, it is very often neglected within school curriculums (although at least  22 states now test listening ). Teachers talk of curriculums that are so tightly packed with other content that they rarely have time to teach soft skills like critical thinking in listening. However,  there is also a lack of concrete, applicable strategies  that teachers can use to improve students’ critical listening skills (Erkek & Batur, 2019).

Paired with the current prevalent idea that teachers “shouldn’t grade behavior,” listening becomes an activity that happens by chance rather than a deliberate skill to be planned and practiced, especially at the higher grade levels.

Strategic and critical listening skills exercises

It can be challenging for teachers to find specific activities to focus on these components. There are many lists of tips to improve cognitive listening comprehension, but few include clearly-defined student exercises to accomplish critical listening goals in the classroom.

Below are several specific listening skills exercises suggestions to improve comprehension, paired with classroom activities.

Distinguish between facts and opinions

One of the essential individual components of critical listening is the ability to recognize the difference between assertions of fact and assertions of opinion. It is also important to  recognize when our own views might be clouding our understanding  or reception.

Erkek & Batur (2019) , Turkish researchers who identified specific classroom exercises to boost critical listening comprehension, suggest that guided student government activities might provide excellent critical listening examples for students.

Student government provides the perfect opportunity for students to listen critically to campaign platforms and student speeches. Teachers, then, can engage the voting student population to recall and analyze each candidate’s assertions and campaign promises. Students can write statements they remember on the board, then sort them in a t-chart: which are fact-based assertions, and which are assertions of opinion?

Then, the teacher can model critical thinking by guiding the class through what is possible given school rules. Are the campaign promises based on factual information, or are they based on the students’ feelings and opinions? Students can then discuss in small groups or cast ballots based on their improved understanding.

The goal here is both analysis and evaluation of the stated assertions through critical thinking in listening. So if students have shown that they understand the speaker’s role and can distinguish between the speaker’s factual statements and assertions of opinion, then the activity was successful.

Understanding bias and assumptions

Assumptions are gaps in logical reasoning  that lead to feeling a certain way about a topic or group. We might look at a student who sleeps during class and assume that they are unmotivated without having all the facts that lead to this action in the classroom. Spotting the assumptions of others can help us communicate more clearly, ourselves.

One way to enhance students’ critical thinking in listening is to present them with oral stories or roleplay scenarios featuring one person’s assumptions. For instance, to introduce the plot of  Othello  to students, a pair of students is given a scenario to perform for the class where one friend tries to convince the other that his girlfriend might not be loyal. Then another pair performs an improv skit where one tries to convince the other that their significant other has been “checking out” another guy  ( Shakespeare Set Free: Teaching  Twelfth Night  and  Othello. Folgers Shakespeare Library. 1995)  .

Then the class discusses the various assumptions and implications of the different parties – of course, driving to a preview of what they’ll be studying in  Othello . But allowing students to listen to the scenarios allows for practice with acquiring information to process critically apart from reading.

Improving logic and reasoning skills

One of the more challenging skills to teach is reasoning. Even adults have trouble identifying the logic and reasoning of various statements. But if we can get students to at least consider and question supporting details, then we’re off to a good start.

So, how is listening connected to critical thinking?  Erkek and Batur (2019)  offer an exercise that presents a situation for students to listen to: an eight-year-old boy describes his morning preparing to sell bagels while watching other children go to school (p. 643). The boy is sweet and honest while explaining what is clearly a typical morning for him.

Students applying critical listening should be able to identify the problem with the story, which is, of course, that an eight-year-old boy is working instead of going to school.

Offering situations that allow students to identify a line of reasoning or identify gaps or problems within a presented sequence gives them opportunities to practice acquiring information through listening but holding it long enough to analyze it.

Hold up new ideas next to old ones

Being able to relate new information to ideas students already hold –  essentially, making comparisons  – is the hallmark of a good teacher and a good reporter. Students who are practicing critical listening can use recorded material like an NPR radio news story to gather information and then clearly explain it to another student (or in a recorded video) in terms that they understand.

Alternatively, a teacher might present  two radio news stories on the same topic . Students could identify why they might accept one as more believable than another (considering tone, word choice, assertions, etc.)

Be receptive to new ideas and perspectives

Often, students get especially invested in their own perceptions of situations, but  good critical listening requires an open mind . One way to practice seeing alternative perspectives is to explore them through familiar stories.

Students could listen to a familiar story like “Little Red Riding Hood,” then retell the story from various other characters’ perspectives.  Students might tell the story from the wolf’s perspective  or the woodsman’s.

When students listen to their classmates’ stories, the teacher could have them evaluate the authenticity of the stories in relation to the original story. They could also consider the variations in stories written by all the students who chose to write from the grandmother’s point of view, for instance.

Students should be encouraged to reflect on what surprised them about their classmates’ retellings.

The relationship between critical thinking and critical listening

At this point, we could be forgiven for thinking that there’s no difference between critical thinking and critical listening – and in some respects, we’d be right. In developing critical listening comprehension, what we’re really doing is building critical thinking.

However, what most of us think of as critical thinking is actually  critical reading . Whether critically reading or listening, we are taking information from the outside and bringing it in to analyze it against what we already know.

Rather than always relying on critical reading, teachers have a clear opportunity to integrate more listening practice, and these listening skills exercises are a wonderful place to start. Teachers can then begin finding additional opportunities to shift critical thinking exercises from reading to listening to ensure more equal distribution.

Focusing on  helping students acquire information from listening  as well as reading results in more balanced skill development and students who understand that their own actions can dictate their learning.

Critical Listening Guide

• Select an audio central text . Tell students they will conduct three rounds of listening.
• Create a Critical Listening Guide using at least two relevant questions from each category—context, audience, purpose, values and style—related to the selected text.
• Round 1 (first listen): Have students listen to the text all the way through without the transcript and without stopping. Allow students to briefly discuss their initial reactions to the text with a partner.
• Pass out the transcript (included with each audio text) and Critical Listening Guide. Go over each question. A mini-lesson may be necessary to define context, audience, purpose and style.
• Round 2 (close listen): Have students listen to the text with the transcript and guide in hand. Pause the audio to discuss key features of the text, using the Critical Listening Guide to structure the discussion. Students should annotate their transcripts using thinking notes to describe context, audience, purpose, values and style. Pause the audio to point out key features of the text, and provide wait time for students to write their responses to questions on the Critical Listening Guide.
• Round 3 (reflective listen): Have students listen to the text all the way through without stopping. Allow time for students to complete their Critical Listening Guide responses.
• Ask students to share how their interpretations of the text may have changed or deepened since the first listen.  

English language learner

Connection to anti-bias education.

• Student sensitivity.
• The Power of Advertising and Girls' Self-Image

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Lesson 2: Understanding the Rhetorical Situation

Lesson 2 overview, introduction.

To be added once received from author.

Upon completion of this lesson, you should be able to:

• Distinguish listening and critical listening.
• Understand the importance of effective listening.
• Apply effective listening principles to the evaluation of speeches.
• Use the rhetorical situation to evaluate speeches.
• Assess Ronald Reagan's "White House Address to the Nation" (popularly known as the "Challenger" address) according to the rhetorical situation.
• Develop strategies for choosing the topics and purposes for your own speeches and for assessing similar choices made by speakers for the speeches you will analyze.

Lesson Readings & Activities

Read the chapters and additional articles first and then return to the Lesson commentary for instruction on how to apply the concepts in the activities and in rhetorical criticism. By the end of this lesson, make sure you have completed the readings and activities found in the Lesson 2 Course Schedule .

Analyzing Public Discourse

This lesson will further develop your understanding of the rhetorical situation as a critical perspective to use in analyzing public discourse. To effectively analyze public discourse, you must listen strategically. To be a citizen-critic, you must attend to what speakers say and how they say it so that you can properly draw on speeches as resources for taking part in public decision-making. Ultimately, you will then be in a better position to prepare your own speeches as part of the deliberative processes in public life.

What Is Criticism?

In Chapter 4, the author defines rhetorical criticism as "the analytic assessment of messages that are intended to affect other people" (p. 89). We can extend this definition to include texts, cultural artifacts, and other symbols that have persuasive effects. Again, almost all messages—even those that are meant simply to inform or to entertain—have some persuasive element and are therefore rhetorical. Insofar as messages influence how we think, how we act, and what we believe, they have consequences in our public and private lives and, therefore, we listen to them as citizen-critics.

The Rhetorical Situation

Lloyd Bitzer introduced the idea of the rhetorical situation to explain how speeches are called into existence: they are a response to a problem, but they are limited in the ways they can respond. 1 How this works will be explained in the next few paragraphs, but here's a quick example: You are sitting in a Parent-Teacher Association meeting at your child's high school when someone suggests that a particular book should be banned from the school library. If you are opposed to banning books, this suggestion is something you will want to eliminate; the meeting itself, the audience, you, and how you choose to phrase your response all provide resources for and limits on what you can say.

Rhetorical critics have developed the concept further to use the analytic theory as a critical method. If a speech properly uses the resources and constraints of a situation to eliminate the exigence that brought the speech into being, then the speech is judged a fitting response—in other words, it's a good speech. Zarefsky draws on Bitzer's ideas to define the rhetorical situation as a situation in which people's understanding can be changed through messages. More importantly, an exigence (an urgent imperfection) is removed by the speech within the constraints and through the resources afforded by four components: audience, occasion, speaker and speech. As we shall see, the rhetorical situation includes much more than the historical or social context of the message; it is a framework that explains how speeches come into being as fitting responses to the situation. (Remember, a fitting response is one that fits the situation: it makes the most of the resources and constraints to say something that eliminates the imperfection.) We can take it further, as critics, to help us assess whether a particular speech was a fitting response to its situation. We will do this in this lesson by evaluating the Challenger address. You will also do this in your Rhetorical Situation speech assignment in the eighth lesson of the course. As you can tell, your preparation for that assignment begins now.

You have re-read the rhetorical situation section in Chapter 1, so let's consider how each of the four elements can be understood and used as a tool for rhetorical criticism. Keep in mind, however, that the textbook was written to help students prepare any kind of speech; Dr. Zarefsky's discussion is aimed toward helping student prepare speeches. You will use his advice, too, when you prepare your speeches, but as a critic, you'll need to extend his discussion of the rhetorical situation as a method to analyze speeches. The rhetorical situation, as a theory and as a critical tool, is not just a convenient way to organize your comments on a speech; it prompts us to use standards of judgment based on the question “Did the speech excel in accommodating the constraints and in using the opportunities of each element in the situation so as to be a fitting response—one that eliminated the exigence?”

For example, in “I Have a Dream” by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we know this is a great speech and an important piece of civic poetry. But, was it a fitting response to the situation? If an exigence is “an imperfection marked by urgency that can be eliminated by speech,” then what needs to be accomplished in that moment (in addition to its enduring effects)? As Dr. King states, the purpose of the speech and the March was “to dramatize a deplorable condition”—that is, to amplify and to create an emotional series of events. The exigence was that the audience needed encouragement in a difficult task, and the history tells us that the speech continues to fulfill its purpose. The immediate historical context for the speech was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (28 August 1963), which occurred during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. As the 16th speech on a long, hot day during a difficult period in the Movement and for the nation as a whole, the speech was constrained by decorum and plausibility, but it drew on the resources within the Occasion of the Lincoln Memorial location and the purpose of the March. The Audience of 250,000 Civil Rights supporters, the Justice Department within the Kennedy Administration, and Civil Rights supporters disenchanted with Dr. King’s non-violent approach constrained the speech with their expectations, but provided resources of shared values and common religious and political texts. The Speaker was constrained by his previous statements and the challenges to his leadership, but had the resources of previous Baptist sermons available as he diverted from the prepared manuscript in the Dream section. The Speech itself was constrained by its dramatic structure, contrasting the “fierce urgency of now” with the “cup of bitterness” to produce a dilemma; the dilemma then became a resource as the speech rose above it and transcended the constraint in the Dream section. We can judge the speech as a fitting response because it managed the constraints and used the resources successfully.

1 Bitzer, Lloyd F. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1 (January, 1968) 1–14. ↩

The Rhetorical Situation: Audience

In the section on audience in Chapter 1 (and later in Chapter 5), Dr. Zarefsky describes the important roles for the audience in the speech-preparation process and provides instruction in how to analyze your audience. Keep in mind that every time he says “you” and “your” with regard to your speech preparation, you can also hear him say “he” or “her” in terms of how a speaker perceived the audience for the speeches you analyze. For example, when you consider the rhetorical situation for the Challenger address, think about how President Reagan was able to anticipate the constraints placed and resources provided by the audience. Then, as you prepare your speech about the Challenger speech, think about how your audience places constraints on and provides resources for your speech.

You may learn about the audience for a particular speech in different ways. In many cases, historical information can help you assess the audience. You might look at who was physically present when the speech was given, but also find out who read, heard, or viewed the speech through another medium (newspaper, television, etc.). Often, speakers, especially public figures, are quite aware that their audience extends beyond the live audience present at the delivery of the speech. Additionally, you can look to the speech itself to determine whom the speaker is addressing. Speakers will choose specific types of language in the speech to address and influence different audiences. By looking at a speech, you can often find clues about whom the speaker hoped to influence, even though that particular audience might not be obvious. Scholarly articles and journalistic reports also provide essential information. Ultimately, we are concerned with not only describing the audience, but also with understanding it as a constraint and a resource used by the speaker; we judge how well that was done.

When you prepare your own speeches, use Dr. Zarefsky's advice as you adapt them, in the rhetorical situation, to the needs and expectations of your audience.

The Rhetorical Situation: Occasion

The second variable you must consider in the rhetorical situation is the occasion, including the event and place at which a speech is delivered. Every speech takes place within a context that includes simultaneous events, audience expectations of appropriate behavior, and the exigence presented by the speaker. Dr. Zarefsky discusses the three genres or categories of speeches that emerge from and help shape the occasion generally: deliberative speech, forensic speech, and ceremonial speech. Since these types of speech have distinct purposes, your judgment of a speech as a fitting response must consider whether the speech achieved its purpose as shaped by the occasion. Keep in mind, though, that occasion refers to more than just genre and is shaped by date and location considerations. For example, it matters whether the president is speaking from the back of a train, from the Oval Office, or in front of a Joint Session of Congress: each of these locations, and the timing of the speech, provides resources and places constraints on the speech.

Each genre of speaking has clear expectations that a speaker should follow. Within each genre, there are sub-genres that further constrain or contribute to the effectiveness of the speech. Presidential inaugurals, for example, are in the sub-genre of presidential rhetoric, which can be further sub-divided into the genre of inaugural addresses. In this case, the speeches are almost always positive in nature. We expect an incoming president to celebrate America and democracy and would be disappointed, if not offended, if a president talked about how bad everything was in America. In evaluating the occasion, you would try to determine what the occasion was (as many speeches combine genres) and whether the speaker fulfills the expectations of the particular situation.

As you begin thinking about the analysis you will do in the Rhetorical Situation speech, you can find more help in Chapter 16, in which Dr. Zarefsky discusses the occasions for speeches and the expectations for speech genres. If you will be analyzing a speech that clearly belongs to a genre, this discussion will be especially helpful. And, as you consider the situations in which you have to give speeches, the discussion will give you guidance on how to prepare speeches that are fitting responses to the exigencies and situational requirements you face.

The Rhetorical Situation: Speaker

The third element of the rhetorical situation is the speaker; the speaker is both a constraint on effectiveness and a great source of persuasiveness. In addition to the logos of the speech itself and the pathos of appeals to audience emotion, speakers rely on ethos. The speaker’s ethos, or character (as perceived by the audience), is partly a result of the reputation the speaker has with the audience, but it is more fully formed by the judgment the audience makes of the speaker's character during the speech. Classically, ethos was understood as goodwill, good judgment, and general "excellence" as a public person. Speakers with these traits were more persuasive. More recently, social scientists have considered the idea of "source credibility," and rhetorical critics have added the psychology of "identification."  Credibility is related to truthfulness and trustworthiness.  Identification refers to the relationship between the speaker and the listeners: if the speaker appears to be very much like the audience, then the audience is inclined to trust the speaker's intentions and accept her arguments. If the audience sees a "sameness" between the speaker and themselves, the audience presumes that even a self-interested speaker is speaking on behalf of audience interests. Dr. Zarefsky considered identification in terms of relationship-building between speaker and audience in Chapter 1 and turns to it more fully in discussing persuasion in Chapter 14. The idea even appears in the structure of speech introductions and in stylistic matters of decorum within the occasion.

In Chapter 1, Dr. Zarefsky considers the speaker in terms of the speaker's success in achieving the goal or purpose of the speech; later, in Chapter 5, he also considers the speaker's ethos as a constraint in the rhetorical situation. Citizen-critics also examine the speaker's ethos. As a critic, you would determine how the speaker's ethos enhances or detracts from the message and how it is a resource for the speech or an obstacle to be overcome. As a speaker yourself, you would prepare for a speech by understanding how you are perceived by the audience and how that adds to your success as a speaker.

The Rhetorical Situation: Speech

The fourth element in the rhetorical situation is the speech itself. A speech that is a fitting response to the rhetorical situation helps to eliminate the exigence by having good and logical ideas. It is coherent in its reasoning and draws on audience values as well as facts and evidence in making its arguments. The language used in the speech and the arrangement of the formal parts of the speech add to a fitting response—or sometimes they detract. Most of the instruction throughout Dr. Zarefsky's book is aimed at helping you prepare a speech that is a fitting response to the rhetorical situation in which you will be speaking. You can also use his ideas, when you listen as a citizen-critic, to help you judge a speech and reach decisions in public life. And, as a rhetorical critic, you can judge a speech as a fitting response to its rhetorical situation. 

These four elements—audience, occasion, speaker, and speech—make up the rhetorical situation. After analyzing these elements and considering how they imposed constraints or provided resources, you should be able to make an informed and critical assessment of a speech's quality. Critical listening, then, goes beyond simply liking a speech or even forming an assessment of the quality of ideas in it: critical listening includes an understanding of the whole rhetorical situation and using that understanding to assess a speech.

Listening Critically

Before you analyze Ronald Reagan's speech using the rhetorical situation framework, you should understand how to listen critically to the message, a skill that will help you be a better critic.

Chapter 4 in Dr. Zarefsky's text reviews basic listening skills and reasons to listen carefully and critically. These will serve you well whenever you listen to a speech as a citizen-critic in public life or when you are thinking about the listening you ask your audience to do when you prepare and give a speech. The skills can also be adapted for your work as a rhetorical critic when you listen to the Challenger address and to the speech you have chosen to study for the Rhetorical Situation speech assignment.

Critical thinking plays an important role in effective listening. Not only do you listen for the content and the art of the speaker, you also consider how you can express your judgments and defend your analysis of the speech. Usually, we can defend our judgments about speeches by using the evaluation standards discussed in Chapter 4. The fitting response in the rhetorical situation is one standard of judgment; successfully achieving the purpose for the speech is another; and ethics provides standards of judgment, as do the principles of criticism.

Listening is hard work. Effective listening matches the effort put in by the speaker (and sometimes exceeds it) in the interest of making decisions in public life, in making judgments about the quality of speeches, and in learning from other speakers how we can prepare our own speeches well. The hard work is rewarded, of course, when we can see clearly just how good a speech can be.

The Challenger Address

View “The Challenger Address” by Ronald Reagan. Then complete the Lesson 2 assignment.

PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN: Ladies and gentlemen, I'd planned to speak to you tonight to report on the State of the Union, but the events of earlier today have led me to change those plans. Today is a day for mourning and remembering. Nancy and I are pained to the core by the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger. We know we share this pain with all of the people of our country. This is truly a national loss.

Nineteen years ago, almost to the day, we lost three astronauts in a terrible accident on the ground, but we've never lost an astronaut in flight. We've never had a tragedy like this, and perhaps we've forgotten the courage it took for the crew of the shuttle. But they, the Challenger Seven, were aware of the dangers and overcame them and did their jobs brilliantly. We mourn seven heroes—Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. We mourn their loss as a nation together.

For the families of the seven, we cannot bear, as you do, the full impact of this tragedy, but we feel the loss and we're thinking about you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, "Give me a challenge, and I'll meet it with joy." They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us.

We've grown used to wonders in this century. It's hard to dazzle us. But for 25 years, the United States space program has been doing just that. We've grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we've only just begun. We're still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.

And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes, painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted. It belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.

I've always had great faith in and respect for our space program, and what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don't hide our space program. We don't keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public.

That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute. We'll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here. Our hopes and our journeys continue.

I want to add that I wish I could talk to every man and woman who works for NASA or who worked on this mission and tell them, "Your dedication and professionalism have moved and impressed us for decades. And we know of your anguish. We share it."

There's a coincidence today. On this day 390 years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime, the great frontiers were the oceans. And a historian later said, "He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it." Well, today, we can say of the Challenger crew, "Their dedication was, like Drake's, complete."

The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them—this morning—as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and "slipped the surly bonds of Earth" to "touch the face of God." Thank you.

Lesson 2 Activities

Criticism of criticism speech video (youseeu), description.

In this initial speech, you will do more than introduce yourself to the class and test the YouSeeU system.

Instructions

In preparation for this speech, find a piece of published criticism about something you love. Tell us about the thing you love, what the critic says about it, and what you have to say about the criticism. Focus mostly on what you learn about criticism from reading some criticism. Your purpose in this speech should not be to persuade the audience to your point of view on your objet d'amour, or that the criticism—positive or negative—is right or wrong. Instead, you’ll explore what criticism is in this particular case and what it assumes about criticism in general. Along the way, you’ll also give the audience insight into your own background, personality, beliefs, values, attitudes, or aspirations. Particular care will be given to explain difficult concepts or aspects of the subject of which a general audience would not ordinarily be aware. Visual aids can only be used to show the thing you love. Source citations are not required unless published sources are used as supporting evidence, but be clear about the author, date, and source of the criticism you discuss. Your speech will display both mastery of the subject-matter and adaptation to the audience in its arguments and appeals, its structure, and use of language.

Length of Presentation: 2–3 minutes

Select the Criticism of Criticism Speech Video assignment in YouSeeU to record or upload your video. Be sure to post your completed video in YouSeeU during the first two weeks of our course.

Lesson 2 Assignment

You will answer questions based on the reading and use the reading to analyze an example of epideictic speech. The reading will also help as you make final preparations for the Criticism of Criticism speech of introduction.

This lesson's assignment has two parts. Please be sure to complete both parts in a single Word document and submit it to complete the assignment. Use and cite at least 3 scholarly sources from the Communication and Mass Media database at libraries.psu.edu (or from a similar scholarly database) to support your claims.

Part I: Analyzing the Rhetorical Situation in Ronald Reagan’s Challenger Address

The assignment for this lesson gives you an opportunity to show your understanding of critical listening and of the method of rhetorical criticism that involves the concept of the rhetorical situation. Looking ahead to the Rhetorical Situation speech assignment, you will also report which speech you plan to analyze using this method.

Before viewing the speech, be sure to read Chapter 4 in your textbook on listening and thinking critically. The concepts and techniques described in the chapter will help you when listening to Reagan’s address. Review, also, Chapter 6; considering the purpose behind President Reagan's speech will help you with your analysis.

In this essay, you will analyze Ronald Reagan's “White House Address to the Nation,” popularly referred to as the Challenger address, in terms of the rhetorical situation. Your essay must address each element of the rhetorical situation to provide supporting evidence for your claims by drawing from the concepts in your book, from your own observations about the speech, and from what you find in the scholarly literature. Steven Mister’s article, an additional reading for this Lesson, should also be used in your argument. These outside sources will be particularly helpful in providing specific information about the audience, the historical context, the events, the president, and NASA.

Requirements

All papers should be Word-processed and cited in the style you are most familiar with (such as APA, MLA, or Chicago). Your paper should be approximately 600–900 words, or two to three double-spaced pages, in Times New Roman;12-point font.

You must have a minimum of three scholarly sources, such as journal articles or scholarly books, for this paper (see an example that you can use for this assignment in the footnote below). 1 In addition, you can use news magazines, such as Time or Newsweek , and newspaper articles for background and historical information. Sources that originate on the Internet are not acceptable. (This means that, if you have a source that was originally published in print but is available online, it is okay to use that source). Remember to take advantage of the Penn State University Libraries search engines. In particular, you may find the New York Times Historical and the ProQuest search engines helpful for this and many of your other assignments.

All papers must be free from typographical and spelling mistakes. Errors of grammar, syntax, and composition affect the assignment grade.

Please compose your essay and bibliography in a Word document and submit it as an attachment to the lesson drop box as a single document that includes Part II of this assignment.

Part II: Choosing a Topic for Your Rhetorical Analysis and Cultural Commonplaces Speaking Activities

For Part II, please indicate the topics for your two major speeches in this course. Please read the activity requirements so that you understand the specific expectations for each presentation.

The Rhetorical Situation speech will be a six- to eight-minute speech in which you analyze a speech according to the concepts of the rhetorical situation. This is an expanded version of the assignment you are doing for the Challenger address in this lesson. You may choose any speech (from such sources as American Rhetoric) that interests you and your audience, except for movie-speeches or speeches that are discussed elsewhere in the lessons for this course. You must be able to access a full-text version of the speech and, preferably, audio and/or video.

Please include

• the name of the speech,
• the name of the speaker,
• the date the speech was given, and
• where you found the text/audio/video online (providing the link or URL).

The Cultural Commonplaces speech will be a six- to eight-minute speech in which you analyze a cultural artifact according to the critical methods developed later in this course. This is an expanded version of the assignment you are doing in Lesson 8. Your artifact should be something that the audience can recognize and engage with. Examples of artifacts for this speech include (but are not limited to) pieces of art, advertisements (print, radio, television, Internet, billboards), television shows, movies, books, short stories, poetry, commercial products, monuments, video games, music, music videos, religious artifacts, and sports. This list is not exhaustive, and you can propose something not listed above that you feel strongly about.

Keep in Mind…

• Please compose proposals in a Word document and submit it as a single-document, file upload that includes Part I of this assignment.
• Note that the assignment has two parts: analyzing a speech and picking topics for the Midterm and Final speeches.
• For Part I, pay particular attention to the first two sentences in the section on The Rhetorical Situation—use the framework of the theory to explain whether the speech was a fitting response.

1 In MLA, it would be: Lule, Jack. “The Political Use of Victims: The Shaping of the Challenger Disaster.” Political Communication & Persuasion 7.2 (July 1990): 115–128. ↩

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5.1 Understanding How and Why We Listen

Learning objectives.

• Describe the stages of the listening process.
• Discuss the four main types of listening.
• Compare and contrast the four main listening styles.

Listening is the learned process of receiving, interpreting, recalling, evaluating, and responding to verbal and nonverbal messages. We begin to engage with the listening process long before we engage in any recognizable verbal or nonverbal communication. It is only after listening for months as infants that we begin to consciously practice our own forms of expression. In this section we will learn more about each stage of the listening process, the main types of listening, and the main listening styles.

The Listening Process

Listening is a process and as such doesn’t have a defined start and finish. Like the communication process, listening has cognitive, behavioral, and relational elements and doesn’t unfold in a linear, step-by-step fashion. Models of processes are informative in that they help us visualize specific components, but keep in mind that they do not capture the speed, overlapping nature, or overall complexity of the actual process in action. The stages of the listening process are receiving, interpreting, recalling, evaluating, and responding.

Before we can engage other steps in the listening process, we must take in stimuli through our senses. In any given communication encounter, it is likely that we will return to the receiving stage many times as we process incoming feedback and new messages. This part of the listening process is more physiological than other parts, which include cognitive and relational elements. We primarily take in information needed for listening through auditory and visual channels. Although we don’t often think about visual cues as a part of listening, they influence how we interpret messages. For example, seeing a person’s face when we hear their voice allows us to take in nonverbal cues from facial expressions and eye contact. The fact that these visual cues are missing in e-mail, text, and phone interactions presents some difficulties for reading contextual clues into meaning received through only auditory channels.

The first stage of the listening process is receiving stimuli through auditory and visual channels.

Britt Reints – LISTEN – CC BY 2.0.

Our chapter on perception discusses some of the ways in which incoming stimuli are filtered. These perceptual filters also play a role in listening. Some stimuli never make it in, some are filtered into subconsciousness, and others are filtered into various levels of consciousness based on their salience. Recall that salience is the degree to which something attracts our attention in a particular context and that we tend to find salient things that are visually or audibly stimulating and things that meet our needs or interests. Think about how it’s much easier to listen to a lecture on a subject that you find very interesting.

It is important to consider noise as a factor that influences how we receive messages. Some noise interferes primarily with hearing, which is the physical process of receiving stimuli through internal and external components of the ears and eyes, and some interferes with listening, which is the cognitive process of processing the stimuli taken in during hearing. While hearing leads to listening, they are not the same thing. Environmental noise such as other people talking, the sounds of traffic, and music interfere with the physiological aspects of hearing. Psychological noise like stress and anger interfere primarily with the cognitive processes of listening. We can enhance our ability to receive, and in turn listen, by trying to minimize noise.

Interpreting

During the interpreting stage of listening, we combine the visual and auditory information we receive and try to make meaning out of that information using schemata. The interpreting stage engages cognitive and relational processing as we take in informational, contextual, and relational cues and try to connect them in meaningful ways to previous experiences. It is through the interpreting stage that we may begin to understand the stimuli we have received. When we understand something, we are able to attach meaning by connecting information to previous experiences. Through the process of comparing new information with old information, we may also update or revise particular schemata if we find the new information relevant and credible. If we have difficulty interpreting information, meaning we don’t have previous experience or information in our existing schemata to make sense of it, then it is difficult to transfer the information into our long-term memory for later recall. In situations where understanding the information we receive isn’t important or isn’t a goal, this stage may be fairly short or even skipped. After all, we can move something to our long-term memory by repetition and then later recall it without ever having understood it. I remember earning perfect scores on exams in my anatomy class in college because I was able to memorize and recall, for example, all the organs in the digestive system. In fact, I might still be able to do that now over a decade later. But neither then nor now could I tell you the significance or function of most of those organs, meaning I didn’t really get to a level of understanding but simply stored the information for later recall.

Our ability to recall information is dependent on some of the physiological limits of how memory works. Overall, our memories are known to be fallible. We forget about half of what we hear immediately after hearing it, recall 35 percent after eight hours, and recall 20 percent after a day (Hargie, 2011). Our memory consists of multiple “storage units,” including sensory storage, short-term memory, working memory, and long-term memory (Hargie, 2011).

Our sensory storage is very large in terms of capacity but limited in terms of length of storage. We can hold large amounts of unsorted visual information but only for about a tenth of a second. By comparison, we can hold large amounts of unsorted auditory information for longer—up to four seconds. This initial memory storage unit doesn’t provide much use for our study of communication, as these large but quickly expiring chunks of sensory data are primarily used in reactionary and instinctual ways.

As stimuli are organized and interpreted, they make their way to short-term memory where they either expire and are forgotten or are transferred to long-term memory. Short-term memory is a mental storage capability that can retain stimuli for twenty seconds to one minute. Long-term memory is a mental storage capability to which stimuli in short-term memory can be transferred if they are connected to existing schema and in which information can be stored indefinitely (Hargie, 2011). Working memory is a temporarily accessed memory storage space that is activated during times of high cognitive demand. When using working memory, we can temporarily store information and process and use it at the same time. This is different from our typical memory function in that information usually has to make it to long-term memory before we can call it back up to apply to a current situation. People with good working memories are able to keep recent information in mind and process it and apply it to other incoming information. This can be very useful during high-stress situations. A person in control of a command center like the White House Situation Room should have a good working memory in order to take in, organize, evaluate, and then immediately use new information instead of having to wait for that information to make it to long-term memory and then be retrieved and used.

Although recall is an important part of the listening process, there isn’t a direct correlation between being good at recalling information and being a good listener. Some people have excellent memories and recall abilities and can tell you a very accurate story from many years earlier during a situation in which they should actually be listening and not showing off their recall abilities. Recall is an important part of the listening process because it is most often used to assess listening abilities and effectiveness. Many quizzes and tests in school are based on recall and are often used to assess how well students comprehended information presented in class, which is seen as an indication of how well they listened. When recall is our only goal, we excel at it. Experiments have found that people can memorize and later recall a set of faces and names with near 100 percent recall when sitting in a quiet lab and asked to do so. But throw in external noise, more visual stimuli, and multiple contextual influences, and we can’t remember the name of the person we were just introduced to one minute earlier. Even in interpersonal encounters, we rely on recall to test whether or not someone was listening. Imagine that Azam is talking to his friend Belle, who is sitting across from him in a restaurant booth. Azam, annoyed that Belle keeps checking her phone, stops and asks, “Are you listening?” Belle inevitably replies, “Yes,” since we rarely fess up to our poor listening habits, and Azam replies, “Well, what did I just say?”

When we evaluate something, we make judgments about its credibility, completeness, and worth. In terms of credibility, we try to determine the degree to which we believe a speaker’s statements are correct and/or true. In terms of completeness, we try to “read between the lines” and evaluate the message in relation to what we know about the topic or situation being discussed. We evaluate the worth of a message by making a value judgment about whether we think the message or idea is good/bad, right/wrong, or desirable/undesirable. All these aspects of evaluating require critical thinking skills, which we aren’t born with but must develop over time through our own personal and intellectual development.

Studying communication is a great way to build your critical thinking skills, because you learn much more about the taken-for-granted aspects of how communication works, which gives you tools to analyze and critique messages, senders, and contexts. Critical thinking and listening skills also help you take a more proactive role in the communication process rather than being a passive receiver of messages that may not be credible, complete, or worthwhile. One danger within the evaluation stage of listening is to focus your evaluative lenses more on the speaker than the message. This can quickly become a barrier to effective listening if we begin to prejudge a speaker based on his or her identity or characteristics rather than on the content of his or her message. We will learn more about how to avoid slipping into a person-centered rather than message-centered evaluative stance later in the chapter.

Responding entails sending verbal and nonverbal messages that indicate attentiveness and understanding or a lack thereof. From our earlier discussion of the communication model, you may be able to connect this part of the listening process to feedback. Later, we will learn more specifics about how to encode and decode the verbal and nonverbal cues sent during the responding stage, but we all know from experience some signs that indicate whether a person is paying attention and understanding a message or not.

We send verbal and nonverbal feedback while another person is talking and after they are done. Back-channel cues are the verbal and nonverbal signals we send while someone is talking and can consist of verbal cues like “uh-huh,” “oh,” and “right,” and/or nonverbal cues like direct eye contact, head nods, and leaning forward. Back-channel cues are generally a form of positive feedback that indicates others are actively listening. People also send cues intentionally and unintentionally that indicate they aren’t listening. If another person is looking away, fidgeting, texting, or turned away, we will likely interpret those responses negatively.

Listeners respond to speakers nonverbally during a message using back-channel cues and verbally after a message using paraphrasing and clarifying questions.

Duane Storey – Listening – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Paraphrasing is a responding behavior that can also show that you understand what was communicated. When you paraphrase information, you rephrase the message into your own words. For example, you might say the following to start off a paraphrased response: “What I heard you say was…” or “It seems like you’re saying…” You can also ask clarifying questions to get more information. It is often a good idea to pair a paraphrase with a question to keep a conversation flowing. For example, you might pose the following paraphrase and question pair: “It seems like you believe you were treated unfairly. Is that right?” Or you might ask a standalone question like “What did your boss do that made you think he was ‘playing favorites?’” Make sure to paraphrase and/or ask questions once a person’s turn is over, because interrupting can also be interpreted as a sign of not listening. Paraphrasing is also a good tool to use in computer-mediated communication, especially since miscommunication can occur due to a lack of nonverbal and other contextual cues.

The Importance of Listening

Understanding how listening works provides the foundation we need to explore why we listen, including various types and styles of listening. In general, listening helps us achieve all the communication goals (physical, instrumental, relational, and identity) that we learned about in Chapter 1 “Introduction to Communication Studies” . Listening is also important in academic, professional, and personal contexts.

In terms of academics, poor listening skills were shown to contribute significantly to failure in a person’s first year of college (Zabava & Wolvin, 1993). In general, students with high scores for listening ability have greater academic achievement. Interpersonal communication skills including listening are also highly sought after by potential employers, consistently ranking in the top ten in national surveys (National Association of Colleges and Employers, 2010).

Poor listening skills, lack of conciseness, and inability to give constructive feedback have been identified as potential communication challenges in professional contexts. Even though listening education is lacking in our society, research has shown that introductory communication courses provide important skills necessary for functioning in entry-level jobs, including listening, writing, motivating/persuading, interpersonal skills, informational interviewing, and small-group problem solving (DiSalvo, 1980). Training and improvements in listening will continue to pay off, as employers desire employees with good communication skills, and employees who have good listening skills are more likely to get promoted.

Listening also has implications for our personal lives and relationships. We shouldn’t underestimate the power of listening to make someone else feel better and to open our perceptual field to new sources of information. Empathetic listening can help us expand our self and social awareness by learning from other people’s experiences and by helping us take on different perspectives. Emotional support in the form of empathetic listening and validation during times of conflict can help relational partners manage common stressors of relationships that may otherwise lead a partnership to deteriorate (Milardo & Helms-Erikson, 2000). The following list reviews some of the main functions of listening that are relevant in multiple contexts.

The main purposes of listening are (Hargie, 2011)

• to focus on messages sent by other people or noises coming from our surroundings;
• to better our understanding of other people’s communication;
• to critically evaluate other people’s messages;
• to monitor nonverbal signals;
• to indicate that we are interested or paying attention;
• to empathize with others and show we care for them (relational maintenance); and
• to engage in negotiation, dialogue, or other exchanges that result in shared understanding of or agreement on an issue.

Listening Types

Listening serves many purposes, and different situations require different types of listening. The type of listening we engage in affects our communication and how others respond to us. For example, when we listen to empathize with others, our communication will likely be supportive and open, which will then lead the other person to feel “heard” and supported and hopefully view the interaction positively (Bodie & Villaume, 2003). The main types of listening we will discuss are discriminative, informational, critical, and empathetic (Watson, Barker, & Weaver III, 1995).

Discriminative Listening

Discriminative listening is a focused and usually instrumental type of listening that is primarily physiological and occurs mostly at the receiving stage of the listening process. Here we engage in listening to scan and monitor our surroundings in order to isolate particular auditory or visual stimuli. For example, we may focus our listening on a dark part of the yard while walking the dog at night to determine if the noise we just heard presents us with any danger. Or we may look for a particular nonverbal cue to let us know our conversational partner received our message (Hargie, 2011). In the absence of a hearing impairment, we have an innate and physiological ability to engage in discriminative listening. Although this is the most basic form of listening, it provides the foundation on which more intentional listening skills are built. This type of listening can be refined and honed. Think of how musicians, singers, and mechanics exercise specialized discriminative listening to isolate specific aural stimuli and how actors, detectives, and sculptors discriminate visual cues that allow them to analyze, make meaning from, or recreate nuanced behavior (Wolvin & Coakley, 1993).

Informational Listening

Informational listening entails listening with the goal of comprehending and retaining information. This type of listening is not evaluative and is common in teaching and learning contexts ranging from a student listening to an informative speech to an out-of-towner listening to directions to the nearest gas station. We also use informational listening when we listen to news reports, voice mail, and briefings at work. Since retention and recall are important components of informational listening, good concentration and memory skills are key. These also happen to be skills that many college students struggle with, at least in the first years of college, but will be expected to have mastered once they get into professional contexts. In many professional contexts, informational listening is important, especially when receiving instructions. I caution my students that they will be expected to process verbal instructions more frequently in their profession than they are in college. Most college professors provide detailed instructions and handouts with assignments so students can review them as needed, but many supervisors and managers will expect you to take the initiative to remember or record vital information. Additionally, many bosses are not as open to questions or requests to repeat themselves as professors are.

Critical Listening

Critical listening entails listening with the goal of analyzing or evaluating a message based on information presented verbally and information that can be inferred from context. A critical listener evaluates a message and accepts it, rejects it, or decides to withhold judgment and seek more information. As constant consumers of messages, we need to be able to assess the credibility of speakers and their messages and identify various persuasive appeals and faulty logic (known as fallacies), which you can learn more about in Chapter 11 “Informative and Persuasive Speaking” . Critical listening is important during persuasive exchanges, but I recommend always employing some degree of critical listening, because you may find yourself in a persuasive interaction that you thought was informative. As is noted in Chapter 4 “Nonverbal Communication” , people often disguise inferences as facts. Critical-listening skills are useful when listening to a persuasive speech in this class and when processing any of the persuasive media messages we receive daily. You can see judges employ critical listening, with varying degrees of competence, on talent competition shows like Rupaul’s Drag Race , America’s Got Talent , and The Voice . While the exchanges between judge and contestant on these shows is expected to be subjective and critical, critical listening is also important when listening to speakers that have stated or implied objectivity, such as parents, teachers, political leaders, doctors, and religious leaders. We will learn more about how to improve your critical thinking skills later in this chapter.

Empathetic Listening

We support others through empathetic listening by trying to “feel with” them.

Stewart Black – Comfort – CC BY 2.0.

Empathetic listening is the most challenging form of listening and occurs when we try to understand or experience what a speaker is thinking or feeling. Empathetic listening is distinct from sympathetic listening. While the word empathy means to “feel into” or “feel with” another person, sympathy means to “feel for” someone. Sympathy is generally more self-oriented and distant than empathy (Bruneau, 1993). Empathetic listening is other oriented and should be genuine. Because of our own centrality in our perceptual world, empathetic listening can be difficult. It’s often much easier for us to tell our own story or to give advice than it is to really listen to and empathize with someone else. We should keep in mind that sometimes others just need to be heard and our feedback isn’t actually desired.

Empathetic listening is key for dialogue and helps maintain interpersonal relationships. In order to reach dialogue, people must have a degree of open-mindedness and a commitment to civility that allows them to be empathetic while still allowing them to believe in and advocate for their own position. An excellent example of critical and empathetic listening in action is the international Truth and Reconciliation movement. The most well-known example of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) occurred in South Africa as a way to address the various conflicts that occurred during apartheid (Department of Justice and Constitutional Development, 2012). The first TRC in the United States occurred in Greensboro, North Carolina, as a means of processing the events and aftermath of November 3, 1979, when members of the Ku Klux Klan shot and killed five members of the Communist Worker’s Party during a daytime confrontation witnessed by news crews and many bystanders. The goal of such commissions is to allow people to tell their stories, share their perspectives in an open environment, and be listened to. The Greensboro TRC states its purpose as such: [1]

The truth and reconciliation process seeks to heal relations between opposing sides by uncovering all pertinent facts, distinguishing truth from lies, and allowing for acknowledgement, appropriate public mourning, forgiveness and healing…The focus often is on giving victims, witnesses and even perpetrators a chance to publicly tell their stories without fear of prosecution.

Listening Styles

Just as there are different types of listening, there are also different styles of listening. People may be categorized as one or more of the following listeners: people-oriented, action-oriented, content-oriented, and time-oriented listeners. Research finds that 40 percent of people have more than one preferred listening style, and that they choose a style based on the listening situation (Bodie & Villaume, 2003). Other research finds that people often still revert back to a single preferred style in times of emotional or cognitive stress, even if they know a different style of listening would be better (Worthington, 2003). Following a brief overview of each listening style, we will explore some of their applications, strengths, and weaknesses.

• People-oriented listeners are concerned about the needs and feelings of others and may get distracted from a specific task or the content of a message in order to address feelings.
• Action-oriented listeners prefer well-organized, precise, and accurate information. They can become frustrated with they perceive communication to be unorganized or inconsistent, or a speaker to be “long-winded.”
• Content-oriented listeners are analytic and enjoy processing complex messages. They like in-depth information and like to learn about multiple sides of a topic or hear multiple perspectives on an issue. Their thoroughness can be difficult to manage if there are time constraints.
• Time-oriented listeners are concerned with completing tasks and achieving goals. They do not like information perceived as irrelevant and like to stick to a timeline. They may cut people off and make quick decisions (taking short cuts or cutting corners) when they think they have enough information.

People-Oriented Listeners

People-oriented listeners are concerned about the emotional states of others and listen with the purpose of offering support in interpersonal relationships. People-oriented listeners can be characterized as “supporters” who are caring and understanding. These listeners are sought out because they are known as people who will “lend an ear.” They may or may not be valued for the advice they give, but all people often want is a good listener. This type of listening may be especially valuable in interpersonal communication involving emotional exchanges, as a person-oriented listener can create a space where people can make themselves vulnerable without fear of being cut off or judged. People-oriented listeners are likely skilled empathetic listeners and may find success in supportive fields like counseling, social work, or nursing. Interestingly, such fields are typically feminized, in that people often associate the characteristics of people-oriented listeners with roles filled by women. We will learn more about how gender and listening intersect in Section 5 “Listening and Gender” .

Action-Oriented Listeners

Action-oriented listeners focus on what action needs to take place in regards to a received message and try to formulate an organized way to initiate that action. These listeners are frustrated by disorganization, because it detracts from the possibility of actually doing something. Action-oriented listeners can be thought of as “builders”—like an engineer, a construction site foreperson, or a skilled project manager. This style of listening can be very effective when a task needs to be completed under time, budgetary, or other logistical constraints. One research study found that people prefer an action-oriented style of listening in instructional contexts (Imhof, 2004). In other situations, such as interpersonal communication, action-oriented listeners may not actually be very interested in listening, instead taking a “What do you want me to do?” approach. A friend and colleague of mine who exhibits some qualities of an action-oriented listener once told me about an encounter she had with a close friend who had a stillborn baby. My friend said she immediately went into “action mode.” Although it was difficult for her to connect with her friend at an emotional/empathetic level, she was able to use her action-oriented approach to help out in other ways as she helped make funeral arrangements, coordinated with other family and friends, and handled the details that accompanied this tragic emotional experience. As you can see from this example, the action-oriented listening style often contrasts with the people-oriented listening style.

Content-Oriented Listeners

Content-oriented listeners like to listen to complex information and evaluate the content of a message, often from multiple perspectives, before drawing conclusions. These listeners can be thought of as “learners,” and they also ask questions to solicit more information to fill out their understanding of an issue. Content-oriented listeners often enjoy high perceived credibility because of their thorough, balanced, and objective approach to engaging with information. Content-oriented listeners are likely skilled informational and critical listeners and may find success in academic careers in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. Ideally, judges and politicians would also possess these characteristics.

Time-Oriented Listeners

Time-oriented listeners are more concerned about time limits and timelines than they are with the content or senders of a message. These listeners can be thought of as “executives,” and they tend to actually verbalize the time constraints under which they are operating.

Time-oriented listeners listen on a schedule, often giving people limits on their availability by saying, for example, “I only have about five minutes.”

JD Lasica – Business call – CC BY-NC 2.0.

For example, a time-oriented supervisor may say the following to an employee who has just entered his office and asked to talk: “Sure, I can talk, but I only have about five minutes.” These listeners may also exhibit nonverbal cues that indicate time and/or attention shortages, such as looking at a clock, avoiding eye contact, or nonverbally trying to close down an interaction. Time-oriented listeners are also more likely to interrupt others, which may make them seem insensitive to emotional/personal needs. People often get action-oriented and time-oriented listeners confused. Action-oriented listeners would be happy to get to a conclusion or decision quickly if they perceive that they are acting on well-organized and accurate information. They would, however, not mind taking longer to reach a conclusion when dealing with a complex topic, and they would delay making a decision if the information presented to them didn’t meet their standards of organization. Unlike time-oriented listeners, action-oriented listeners are not as likely to cut people off (especially if people are presenting relevant information) and are not as likely to take short cuts.

Key Takeaways

• Getting integrated: Listening is a learned process and skill that we can improve on with concerted effort. Improving our listening skills can benefit us in academic, professional, personal, and civic contexts.
• Listening is the process of receiving, interpreting, recalling, evaluating, and responding to verbal and nonverbal messages. In the receiving stage, we select and attend to various stimuli based on salience. We then interpret auditory and visual stimuli in order to make meaning out of them based on our existing schemata. Short-term and long-term memory store stimuli until they are discarded or processed for later recall. We then evaluate the credibility, completeness, and worth of a message before responding with verbal and nonverbal signals.
• Discriminative listening is the most basic form of listening, and we use it to distinguish between and focus on specific sounds. We use informational listening to try to comprehend and retain information. Through critical listening, we analyze and evaluate messages at various levels. We use empathetic listening to try to understand or experience what a speaker is feeling.
• People-oriented listeners are concerned with others’ needs and feelings, which may distract from a task or the content of a message. Action-oriented listeners prefer listening to well-organized and precise information and are more concerned about solving an issue than they are about supporting the speaker. Content-oriented listeners enjoy processing complicated information and are typically viewed as credible because they view an issue from multiple perspectives before making a decision. Although content-oriented listeners may not be very effective in situations with time constraints, time-oriented listeners are fixated on time limits and listen in limited segments regardless of the complexity of the information or the emotions involved, which can make them appear cold and distant to some.
• The recalling stage of the listening process is a place where many people experience difficulties. What techniques do you use or could you use to improve your recall of certain information such as people’s names, key concepts from your classes, or instructions or directions given verbally?
• Getting integrated: Identify how critical listening might be useful for you in each of the following contexts: academic, professional, personal, and civic.
• Listening scholars have noted that empathetic listening is the most difficult type of listening. Do you agree? Why or why not?
• Which style of listening best describes you and why? Which style do you have the most difficulty with or like the least and why?

Bodie, G. D. and William A. Villaume, “Aspects of Receiving Information: The Relationships between Listening Preferences, Communication Apprehension, Receiver Apprehension, and Communicator Style,” International Journal of Listening 17, no. 1 (2003): 48.

Bruneau, T., “Empathy and Listening,” in Perspectives on Listening , eds. Andrew D. Wolvin and Carolyn Gwynn Coakley (Norwood, NJ: Alex Publishing Corporation, 1993), 188.

Department of Justice and Constitutional Development, Truth and Reconciliation Commission website, accessed July 13, 2012, http://www.justice.gov.za/trc .

DiSalvo, V. S. “A Summary of Current Research Identifying Communication Skills in Various Organizational Contexts,” Communication Education 29 (1980), 283–90.

Hargie, O., Skilled Interpersonal Interaction: Research, Theory, and Practice (London: Routledge, 2011), 189–99.

Imhof, M., “Who Are We as We Listen? Individual Listening Profiles in Varying Contexts,” International Journal of Listening 18, no. 1 (2004): 39.

Milardo, R. M. and Heather Helms-Erikson, “Network Overlap and Third-Party Influence in Close Relationships,” in Close Relationships: A Sourcebook , eds. Clyde Hendrick and Susan S. Hendrick (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000), 37.

National Association of Colleges and Employers, Job Outlook 2011 (2010): 25.

Watson, K. W., Larry L. Barker, and James B. Weaver III, “The Listening Styles Profile (LS-16): Development and Validation of an Instrument to Assess Four Listening Styles,” International Journal of Listening 9 (1995): 1–13.

Wolvin, A. D. and Carolyn Gwynn Coakley, “A Listening Taxonomy,” in Perspectives on Listening , eds. Andrew D. Wolvin and Carolyn Gwynn Coakley (Norwood, NJ: Alex Publishing Corporation, 1993), 18–19.

Worthington, D. L., “Exploring the Relationship between Listening Style Preference and Personality,” International Journal of Listening 17, no. 1 (2003): 82.

Zabava, W. S. and Andrew D. Wolvin, “The Differential Impact of a Basic Communication Course on Perceived Communication Competencies in Class, Work, and Social Contexts,” Communication Education 42 (1993): 215–17.

• “About,” Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission website, accessed July 13, 2012, http://www.greensborotrc.org/truth_reconciliation.php . ↵

Communication in the Real World Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Critical listening: how to benefit from this misunderstood skill

Critical listening has a bad reputation. When we think about listening, it’s words like ‘active’ and ‘empathetic’ that have positive connotations, but ‘critical’ listening is often considered negatively.

A positive definition

If you look at the definition of the word ‘critical’, you’ll see phrases such as “ expressing adverse or disapproving comments or judgments ”. It’s this definition that encourages the negative perceptions.

However, look at the definition of ‘critique’, and you’ll see “ a detailed analysis and assessment ”.

For anyone who likes to think in terms of the structure of the English language, you can think of critical listening is a verb, “ to analyze and assess ”, it really has a very positive connotation!

Simply put, it’s the ability to pay attention to what other people are saying while assessing the validity and value of the information they are conveying. Dick Billows

When to use critical listening

Critical listening is best used when a detailed analysis and assessment is required as the basis for making a decision or a recommendation.

It’s a useful skill, when applied appropriately. There are times when other styles of listening will be more effective. Here are a few examples of activities and the styles of listening to use:

• Brainstorming or idea generation required open listening (to generating more ideas)
• Coaching a team member requires empathetic listening (to formulate coaching questions)
• Taking a break requires appreciative listening (for example, listening to music to relax and enjoy)
• Evaluating a proposal requires critical listening (to make a decision)

As you’re listening, be aware of how you’re listening, and whether you’re listening in the most appropriate way for the activity you’re undertaking. For more guidance on listening, take a look at how to become a better listener .

The skills of critical listening

When you’re using critical listening to undertake a detailed analysis and assessment, there are 5 specific critical listening skills:

1. Assessing the strength of logic

Logic models in formal project management methodologies are planning tools that define the inputs, outputs, outcomes of a program. They explain the thinking behind program design and show how specific program activities lead to desired results.

You may not be presented with a formal logic model, but you can apply the same idea. As you listen to assess what is being said, consider the strength of logic.

• Does the proposal start from the right point?
• Is the structure reasonable?
• Does each step have a clear connection?
• Are the inter dependencies clear?
• Does the resourcing match the activities and timeline?

The specific questions will vary depending on the exact circumstances, the skill is to bring the strength of logic to your critical listening.

2. Checking for assumptions and bias

Look out for the nemesis of logic: assumptions and bias.

An assumption is something that is accepted as true without evidence. The danger is that it’s not true! For example, there may be an assumption that a critical license can be easily secured, or that a key stakeholder will support the initiative, or that budget will be available. As you’re listening, check for assumptions that could be proven wrong.

A bias is a prejudice for or against one person or group (or plan of action), especially in a way considered to be unfair. A bias can be unconscious, and it’s your job as you’re listening critically, to assess for bias and prejudice. Has an alternative option been dismissed to easily? Are recommendations skewed by unconscious prejudice? What are the implications of this?

3. Evaluating the evidence

Listening for evidence is the third specific skill to master.

Evidence can come in many forms: factual, financial, survey data, direct quotations, data from markets and competitors, proof of concepts, etc. Your task, as you’re listening, is to assess the value of the evidence and the extent to which it supports what is being proposed.

Remember to look for gaps in evidence too!

4. Checking for ‘Fit to goals’

We align our work towards certain agreed goals. That’s the intent. However, the reality is more complex. We have short-term and long-term goals. We have different stakeholders with different needs. We have an overall strategy and specific milestones within that strategy. We may also have local, regional and global perspectives. There are many different aspects.

How does what you’re listening to fit to goals? What is it really achieving and what’s missing? Where are the areas of misalignment? Which stakeholders’ needs are not being fully met? What are the consequences of all these points?

5. Assessing for completeness

The final critical listening skill is to assess for completeness. What is not being said? What is not being considered?

In many respects this is the hardest part of critical listening. You need to continue applying the 4 skills above, while also keeping some ‘mental bandwidth’ available for the unsaid.

This ability to analyze what is not being said will often trigger powerful insights that help you to effectively assess the value of what is being said.

Critical listening in summary

Critical listening is essential when you wish to analyze and assess what is being said.

There are 5 specific skills:

• Assessing the strength of logic
• Checking for assumptions and biases
• Evaluating the evidence
• Checking for ‘fit to goals’
• Assessing for completeness

Practice these 5 skills to develop your critical listening!

For more support to develop your listening skills, including a 5-day plan, take a look at the Chinese character for listening .

Three Steps for Critical Listening

Who do you think is more powerful when it comes to collaborative relationships: a good speaker or a good listener? Of course, many good speakers are also good listeners, but if you could select only one of these two attributes, which would you choose?

I would definitely choose the second for myself. In fact, I believe that good listening skills are the most important set of skills that an individual can possess. Of course, I am not referring to the ability to mindlessly listen to what somebody is saying and do exactly what they are telling you do. Rather, I mean the ability to listen critically. There are several very important steps that most critical, or active, learners go through during the listening process.

Simply listen – Listen to the words that the speaker is using. Fully focus on the message that the speaker is conveying. Do not think about what you are going to say next.

Repeat what the speaker has said, back to him/her – Of course, ask permission to do this. Everybody wants to know that they have been listened to. So, the very act of asking this question is helping to develop a deeper relationship with the speaker. During this repetition process, you, the active listener, have an opportunity to consider the reasons why the speaker said what he did. Test your assumptions and considerations by asking, “Did you say this because…”  During this process, do not judge what the speaker has said.

 Encourage the speaker to say more – After you feel that you have developed a deep understanding of what the speaker has said, probe for even a deeper understanding. To do this, you can ask open-ended questions – “Why?” is a particularly good one. If you really want to probe deeply ask this question repeatedly to help the speaker further and further uncover their thoughts. It is absolutely essential to do this with respect and true interest. However, if you are truly interested in what somebody is saying, it can be taken as a near-certainty that the speaker will want to talk.

While critical listeners have the ability to really get to know other people, as they listen to them, every successful salesperson knows that before a sale can be made, you must understand the needs and expectations of your customer. Listening is required to accomplish this objective.  In his book, To Sell is Human, Daniel Pink argues that in the 21st Century everybody must sell. People sell ideas, invitations, their own knowledge and skills, and more. If Pink’s thesis is true, then everybody would benefit from learning the skills of critical listening.

At A Pass Educational Group, it is particularly important for us to be good listeners when interacting with our clients. For, as a company, we exist to help our clients bring their educational content visions to life. We interpret this as working with our clients to understand the specifications and objectives that they have for their educational content. In order to develop an understanding of our client’s specifications and objectives, it is crucial that we practice the habits of critical listeners.

What is the one most intriguing idea that you have ever heard because you were listening critically?

Who is A Pass?

A Pass Educational Group, LLC is an organization dedicated to the development of quality educational resources. We partner with publishers, K-12 schools, higher ed institutions, corporations, and other educational stakeholders to create custom quality content. Have questions?

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Browse Course Material

Course info.

• Jane Dunphy

Departments

• Global Studies and Languages

As Taught In

• English as a Second Language

Learning Resource Types

Advanced speaking and critical listening skills (els), assignments, mock job interview.

In pairs, students will stimulate a job interview between a recruiter for Charles River Consulting and an MIT graduate. Each student will have the chance to be both the interviewer and the applicant. Each interview should last no more than four-five minutes.

The interview will take place between a candidate seeking a position as consultant with Charles River Consulting and the company’s Director of Human Resources.

Preparation

Be familiar with the materials on job interviews. Please see MIT Career Office: Interviewing .

Worksheet for Strategic Interviews ( PDF )

You will be evaluated only on your role as the job applicant. Please see the criteria for grading here ( PDF ).

Impromptu Debate

This assignment provides an opportunity to practice several communication skills we have been studying in class: efficient group dynamics, summarizing information, and impromptu speaking.

Each of you is expected to come to class having read your group’s assigned article on a controversial subject and considered both sides of the argument. You will be a member of a debate team. You will not know in advance whether you will be arguing for or against the proposition.

Your group’s performance will be based on the following criteria:

• Preparedness and choice of key arguments
• Group dynamics and flow between speakers
• Clarity of expression
• Use of gambits and flexibility in responding to opponents
• Nonverbal communication

Procedure ( PDF )

Worksheet and Summary ( PDF )

Interactive Teaching

Clearly demonstrates a process , provide instructions (“how to”) or exlpain a concept . Expect to be interrupted by teh audience members. Encourage the students to engage in this material, even if it means interrupting you. In other words, teach the class!

What to Bring with You to the Teaching Lab

• An 8-cm Sony® Plus Rewriteable (RW) DVD
• A one-page memo outlining your audience and key message (NOT your topic)
• An outline of your lessons to hand into the instructor

Approximately 8-10 minutes (depending on the size of the class), including interactions (questions and comments) with the class.

A group of glass members.

• Choose a topic and key message to fit the audience and the time limit.
• Plan your opening remaks, organization and closing remarks of your teaching session carefully.
• Plan your use of the blackboard and/or handouts carefully.
• Speack extemporaneously from an outline or note cards.
• Study the strategies for teaching success reviewed and class and available here. (PDF)
• Antcipate several places in your teaching session where you can encourage interactions
• Practice pronouncing the key vocabulary of the lesson to be sure it is accurate.
• Review your past speaking evluations.

Formal Introduction

You may, at a conference, professional meeting, or formal celebration, be required to introduce a speaker. Think of a colleague or mentor whom you would like to introduce at a conference. Prepare notes for a 1-2 minute extemporaneous introduction.

A typical introduction for these kinds of events is designed to

• Provide the audience with some background on the speaker (e.g., formal education)
• Provide information that modesty may prevent the speaker from sharing (e.g., honors, accomplishments)
• Appeal to the listeners’ interest
• Indicate the importance of the topic

To be effective, you should be direct, respectful and brief. Avoid providing a detailed life history, or a long personal anecdote to “pad” your introduction.

Criteria for Grading Content and Style

• Demonstrated sensitivity to direct style and time limitations
• Provided the audience with a brief background on the speaker (e.g., formal education, honors, accomplishments)
• Provided a clear statement of the speaker’s purpose for the current talk
• Provided a graceful transition from the introduction to the speaker

Criteria for Grading Content and Style: Delivery

• Volume and pace
• Pronunciation and phrasing
• Gambits to signal start and end, and to move between statements
• No dependence on notes
• Eye contact and facial expression
• Posture and gestures

Explanation of a Visual Aid

Design one slide that demonstrates “best practice” and bring a hard copy (transparency or paper) to class. Be prepared to spend approximately two minutes explaining the content of the slide to the class.

Research/Business Presention with Q & A

You have approximately fifteen minutes to deliver a presentation, including a question and answer (Q & A) session, to a specific professional audience with a need for, and interest in, your information. You may base the presentation on material in one of your other course, on a paper or a research project you have already completed, or on research in which you are currently involved. Appropriate topics include the state of the art of a particular technology, exciting new research results and their ramifications; new uses for old methods/materials, policy analyses, and market research to identify new niches.

Guidelines for Successful Q & A Sessions ( PDF )

Materials Needed

• A one-page memo describing your goal, audience and key message
• An outline of your presentation
• A laptop and Microsfot® PowerPoint® visuals
• Paper copies of all visuals (no color printing required)

You will view your recorded presenation and prepare a short reaction/self-evaluation to send in an e-mail message to me no later than the last day of class.

Washington Week

Students were required to watch an episode of the PBS show Washington Week .

Washington Week Worksheet ( PDF )

Critical Review Memos

You will be responsible for five short memos over the course of the semester; they are summarized below.

Please consult the following sample memos for proper formatting:

Sample Conventional Memo ( PDF )

Sample Progress Memo ( PDF )

The two progress memos must provide at least one critical review of a recommended material from the syllabus as well, as any language lab or on-line materials of your choice, TV and radio programs, movies or plays, or the speaking and critical listening skills of friends, colleagues and mentors that you have noticed in social or academic contexts.

Before writing your progress memos, ask yourself questions like the following:

• “What was my objective for this exercise?”
• “Did I learn something from this activity?” Were the materials interesting/boring/difficult to use?" Why?
• “Did I notice a connection between the materials and topics covered in class?” What?
• “Would I recommend these materials to my colleagues in 21G.232/3?” “If not, why not?”
• How do I know that my friend/colleague/mentor is listening to what I say?
• How do I know if my friend/colleague/mentor is having trouble understanding me?
• Of the seminars, lectures, meetings that I have attended lately, who was the best/worse speaker? Why?
• Have I seen a particularly well-designed and well-used PowerPoint presentation recently? Where? What made it impressive?
• Have I attended any meetings recently? Were they well run? What could have improved them? What was my role in them?

Your detailed responses to such questions can form the body of your progress memo.

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7 types of listening that can change your life and work

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7 types of listening skills

Why is listening so important in life and at work?

Learn all types of listening to improve your life and your work

The importance of listening can’t be overstated. 

While   learning to communicate what you want to say is important , knowing how to listen using different types of listening skills is just as crucial for communication. 

Not only can it help you process information on different levels, but it can also help you build relationships with others.

That’s because listening goes deeper than just hearing.

It’s also much more than listening to the words someone else is saying. While this is one type of listening, it isn’t the only one that matters.

Let’s discuss the various types of listening and why listening is important for helping you advance your career and life.

• Informational listening
• Discriminative listening
• Biased listening
• Sympathetic listening
• Comprehensive listening
• Empathetic or therapeutic listening
• Critical listening

There are several types of listening you can develop both at home and at work.

Let’s explore seven of these types of listening, why they matter, and what they can look like:

1. Informational listening

When you want to learn something, you’ll use informational listening to understand and retain information. 

It usually takes a high level of concentration to perform this type of listening. That’s because you   need to be highly engaged   to understand a new concept.

You also need to apply critical thinking to what you are learning. This is so you can understand what you’re learning within the context of relevant information.

Some examples of informational listening include:

• Work training
• Self-paced learning at home or at work
• Listening to an educational ebook

When you know how to use informational listening, you empower yourself to become a better learner. By actively learning and improving yourself, you can become a more valuable asset in your place of work.

You can also feel more fulfilled when you pursue your passions and learn something new at home.

2. Discriminative listening

Discriminative listening is the first listening type that you’re born with.

Everyone innately has discriminative listening skills.

You use this type of listening before you even know how to understand words. Instead of relying on words, discriminative listening uses tone of voice, verbal cues, and other changes in sound.

Discriminative listening is how babies understand the intention of a phrase before they can understand words. If someone speaks to them in a happy and amused tone of voice, they’ll smile and laugh back.

They can also tell who is talking because they recognize different voices.

But discriminative listening isn’t just for babies.

If you’re listening to a conversation happening in a foreign language, you’ll likely automatically use your discriminative listening skills.

These will allow you to analyze tone and inflection to get an idea of what is going on.

You can also use nonverbal cues to listen and analyze. For instance, someone’s facial expressions, body language, and other mannerisms can tell you a lot about the meaning of someone’s message.

You shouldn't discount discriminative listening, even if you understand someone’s language.

This listening style is key to understanding the subtle cues in a conversation. Using this listening skill can help you read between the lines and hear what remains unspoken.

Here’s an example: 

Let’s say you ask one of your colleagues if they agree with a course of action.

They say yes, but you can tell from their body language, such as shifting uncomfortably, that something is wrong. 

Using your discriminative listening skills, you can pick up on this and ask them if they’re certain. You can also ask if something is going on that they’d like to discuss.

3. Biased listening 

Biased listening is also known as selective listening.

Someone who uses biased listening will only listen for information that they specifically want to hear.

This listening process can lead to a distortion of facts. That’s because the person listening isn’t fully in tune with what the speaker wishes to communicate.

Let’s say your superior is briefing you on a new project. You’re waiting to hear about the details of this assignment because you’ve been excited for a long time about it.

Because you’re so focused on the details of the assignment, you don’t fully hear everything your superior says. As a result, you   hear   your superior explain how you’ll be judged on this project, but you don’t fully   process   it.

Because you don’t have this information, you may not perform as well as you could if you had understood all the details.

4. Sympathetic listening

Sympathetic listening is driven by emotion.

Instead of focusing on the message spoken through words, the listener focuses on the feelings and emotions of the speaker.

This is done to process these feelings and emotions.

By using sympathetic listening, you can provide the support the speaker needs. You can understand   how they’re really feeling , not what they say they are feeling.

The speaker will feel heard and validated when you take the time to pay attention in this way.

Sympathetic listening is crucial if you want to build a deeper relationship with someone in your life.

For example, let’s say you run into a work colleague at the grocery store. They seem upset, so you decide to listen to what they have to say.

You also use sympathetic listening to feel how they are feeling. In doing this, you notice how frustrated they are about the lack of recognition they are getting at work.

As a result, you can offer your support and sympathize with their situation.

5. Comprehensive listening

Unlike discriminative listening, comprehensive listening requires language skills.

This type of listening is usually developed in early childhood.

People use comprehensive listening to understand what someone is saying using words.

Several other types of listening build on comprehensive listening. For example, you need to use comprehensive listening to use informational listening and learn something new.

At work and in your life, you’ll likely use a combination of comprehensive and discriminative listening to understand the messages people are giving you.

For example, let’s say your colleague briefs you on a project. You’ll need to use comprehensive listening to analyze the words and understand the message.

You’ll also use comprehensive listening   when you receive feedback .

6. Empathetic or therapeutic listening

Empathetic listening is useful to help you see from other people’s perspectives.

Using this type of listening, you can try to understand someone else’s point of view as they’re speaking. You can also try to imagine yourself in the other person’s shoes.

Instead of just focusing on their message, you can use empathetic listening to relate to someone else’s experiences as if they were your own.

This is different from sympathetic listening.

With sympathetic listening, you try to understand someone’s feelings to provide support. But you don’t necessarily try to imagine what it’d feel like to be in their position.

Let’s say your superior just announced that this week’s company outing is canceled due to budget cuts.

By using empathetic listening, you can tell how much pressure your superior is feeling. You can imagine yourself having to break the bad news. 

You know there’s pressure from higher-ups to respect the budget. You also know that there’s pressure from employees.

Instead of getting upset, you understand why your superior made this decision. That’s because you can imagine what it’s like to be in their shoes at this moment.

7. Critical listening 

If you need to analyze complex information, you’ll need to use critical listening.

Using critical thinking while listening goes deeper than comprehensive listening. Instead of taking the information at face value, you can use critical listening to evaluate what’s being said.

Critical listening is crucial when problem-solving at work. 

For example, you’d use this type of listening when trying to choose how to handle an unusual and complex client request.

You need to use this skill to analyze solutions offered by other people and decide if you agree or not. 

To do this, you don’t just need to hear their words. You also need to look at the bigger picture and compare everything you know.

Why is listening so important in life and at work? 

Listening is a key component of effective   communication skills .

Regardless of the type, listening is key to understanding what other people are really trying to say. Without listening, it's easy to get something wrong and make assumptions.

On the other hand, when you actively listen, you can fully communicate with someone else. 

Listening is the most important part of communication. That’s because it allows you to come up with a substantial and meaningful response. You can pick up on subtleties you wouldn’t have otherwise,   especially with body language .

If something isn’t clear, you can ask clarifying questions. This is something you might not have done without active listening.

At work, communication is an important soft skill. According to LinkedIn's 2019 Global Talent Trends report, 80% of companies say that soft skills are increasingly important to their success.

Listening is also important for   productive collaboration . 

According to the same LinkedIn report, collaboration is the third most important soft skill companies need. 

Imagine trying to collaborate if you can’t actively listen to your colleagues. Information gets lost, and misunderstandings occur.

The same can happen if everyone on the team uses different levels of listening. Some people will be more engaged than others. Not everyone will get the same understanding of the same conversation. 

You can avoid this if everyone actively listens to each other.

Plus, when you actively listen, your colleagues and your superiors will notice that you come up with meaningful responses. 

Listening is also crucial if you want to learn effectively.

Without attentive listening, it can be easy to miss small details that make a difference in your learning.

Active listening games

You can improve team communication with active listening games.

In one such game, you and your colleagues can split up into groups of two. The first person in each group is given a picture, while the other person is given a pen and paper. 

The second participant needs to ask questions in order to accurately draw the image the first participant is holding.

In another game, participants need to mime non-verbal cues to express their feelings about a topic. The other participants need to write down what they believe the other person feels.

Finally, you can practice active listening by having all participants listen to one person speak for three to five minutes. During this time, no other participants may speak. Afterwards, the other participants need to paraphrase what they think the other person said.

Learn all types of listening to improve your life and your work 

One type of listening isn’t better than the other. Instead, these seven types of listening work together to help you better understand the messages you receive.

By being a good listener, you can become a better communicator, avoid misunderstandings, and learn new information more easily.

If you’re struggling to become an active listener, you’re not alone. You can make it easier to work on those skills through coaching from experts at BetterUp.

Schedule a coaching demo today   to see how it can help you become a better listener.

Understand Yourself Better:

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Elizabeth Perry, ACC

Elizabeth Perry is a Coach Community Manager at BetterUp. She uses strategic engagement strategies to cultivate a learning community across a global network of Coaches through in-person and virtual experiences, technology-enabled platforms, and strategic coaching industry partnerships. With over 3 years of coaching experience and a certification in transformative leadership and life coaching from Sofia University, Elizabeth leverages transpersonal psychology expertise to help coaches and clients gain awareness of their behavioral and thought patterns, discover their purpose and passions, and elevate their potential. She is a lifelong student of psychology, personal growth, and human potential as well as an ICF-certified ACC transpersonal life and leadership Coach.

Talk less, listen more: 6 reasons it pays to learn the art

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Types of Listening

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Most people, most of the time, take listening for granted, it’s something that just happens.  It is only when you stop to think about listening and what it entails that you begin to realise that listening is in fact an important skill that needs to be nurtured and developed.

Listening is perhaps the most important of all interpersonal skills and SkillsYouNeed has many pages devoted to the subject, see Listening Skills for an introduction. Further pages include The Ten Principles of Listening , Active Listening and Listening Misconceptions . 

Effective listening is very often the foundation of strong relationships with others, at home, socially, in education and in the workplace. This page draws on the work of Wolvin and Coakely (1996) and others to examine the various types of listening.

We hope that this page will be useful to both teachers – as teaching listening skills can be challenging – and also to students and other learners who are interested in developing their listening skills.

Listening: the process of receiving, constructing meaning from, and responding to spoken and/or non-verbal messages.

– International Listening Association.

General Listening Types:

The two main types of listening - the foundations of all listening sub-types are:

Discriminative Listening

Comprehensive listening.

Discriminative listening is first developed at a very early age – perhaps even before birth, in the womb. This is the most basic form of listening and does not involve the understanding of the meaning of words or phrases but merely the different sounds that are produced. In early childhood, for example, a distinction is made between the sounds of the voices of the parents – the voice of the father sounds different to that of the mother.

Discriminative listening develops through childhood and into adulthood. As we grow older and develop and gain more life experience, our ability to distinguish between different sounds is improved. Not only can we recognise different voices, but we also develop the ability to recognise subtle differences in the way that sounds are made – this is fundamental to ultimately understanding what these sounds mean.  Differences include many subtleties, recognising foreign languages, distinguishing between regional accents and clues to the emotions and feelings of the speaker.

Being able to distinguish the subtleties of sound made by somebody who is happy or sad, angry or stressed, for example, ultimately adds value to what is actually being said and, of course, does aid comprehension. When discriminative listening skills are combined with visual stimuli, the resulting ability to ‘listen’ to body-language enables us to begin to understand the speaker more fully – for example recognising somebody is sad despite what they are saying or how they are saying it.

Imagine yourself surrounded by people who are speaking a language that you cannot understand. Perhaps passing through an airport in another country. You can probably distinguish between different voices, male and female, young and old and also gain some understanding about what is going on around you based on the tone of voice, mannerisms and body language of the other people. 

You are not understanding what is being said but using discriminative listening to gain some level of comprehension of your surroundings.

Comprehensive listening involves understanding the message or messages that are being communicated. Like discriminative listening, comprehensive listening is fundamental to all listening sub-types.

In order to be able use comprehensive listening and therefore gain understanding the listener first needs appropriate vocabulary and language skills. Using overly complicated language or technical jargon, therefore, can be a barrier to comprehensive listening. Comprehensive listening is further complicated by the fact that two different people listening to the same thing may understand the message in two different ways. This problem can be multiplied in a group setting, like a classroom or business meeting where numerous different meanings can be derived from what has been said.

Comprehensive listening is complimented by sub-messages from non-verbal communication, such as the tone of voice, gestures and other body language.  These non-verbal signals can greatly aid communication and comprehension but can also confuse and potentially lead to misunderstanding. In many listening situations it is vital to seek clarification and use skills such as reflection aid comprehension.

Specific Listening Types

Discriminative and comprehensive listening are prerequisites for specific listening types.

Listening types can be defined by the goal of the listening.

The three main types of listening most common in interpersonal communication are:

• Informational Listening (Listening to Learn)
• Critical Listening (Listening to Evaluate and Analyse)
• Therapeutic or Empathetic Listening (Listening to Understand Feeling and Emotion)

In reality you may have more than one goal for listening at any given time – for example, you may be listening to learn whilst also attempting to be empathetic.

Informational Listening

Whenever you listen to learn something, you are engaged in informational listening.  This is true in many day-to-day situations, in education and at work, when you listen to the news, watch a documentary, when a friend tells you a recipe or when you are talked-through a technical problem with a computer – there are many other examples of informational listening too.

Although all types of listening are ‘active’ – they require concentration and a conscious effort to understand. Informational listening is less active than many of the other types of listening.  When we’re listening to learn or be instructed we are taking in new information and facts, we are not criticising or analysing.  Informational listening, especially in formal settings like in work meetings or while in education, is often accompanied by note taking – a way of recording key information so that it can be reviewed later. (See Note-Taking for more information.)

Critical Listening

We can be said to be engaged in critical listening when the goal is to evaluate or scrutinise what is being said. Critical listening is a much more active behaviour than informational listening and usually involves some sort of problem solving or decision making.  Critical listening is akin to critical reading; both involve analysis of the information being received and alignment with what we already know or believe.  Whereas informational listening may be mostly concerned with receiving facts and/or new information - critical listening is about analysing opinion and making a judgement.

When the word ‘critical’ is used to describe listening, reading or thinking it does not necessarily mean that you are claiming that the information you are listening to is somehow faulty or flawed.   Rather, critical listening means engaging in what you are listening to by asking yourself questions such as, ‘what is the speaker trying to say?’ or ‘what is the main argument being presented?’, ‘how does what I’m hearing differ from my beliefs, knowledge or opinion?’.  Critical listening is, therefore, fundamental to true learning. (Also see our page: Critical Reading ).

Many day-to-day decisions that we make are based on some form of ‘critical’ analysis, whether it be critical listening, reading or thought.  Our opinions, values and beliefs are based on our ability to process information and formulate our own feelings about the world around us as well as weigh up the pros and cons to make an informed decision. 

It is often important, when listening critically, to have an open-mind and not be biased by stereotypes or preconceived ideas.  By doing this you will become a better listener and broaden your knowledge and perception of other people and your relationships.

Therapeutic or Empathic Listening

Empathic listening involves attempting to understand the feelings and emotions of the speaker – to put yourself into the speaker’s shoes and share their thoughts.  (See our page: What is Empathy? for more information).

Empathy is a way of deeply connecting with another person and therapeutic or empathic listening can be particularly challenging.  Empathy is not the same as sympathy, it involves more than being compassionate or feeling sorry for somebody else – it involves a deeper connection – a realisation and understanding of another person’s point of view. 

Counsellors, therapists and some other professionals use therapeutic or empathic listening to understand and ultimately help their clients.  This type of listening does not involve making judgements or offering advice but gently encouraging the speaker to explain and elaborate on their feelings and emotions.  Skills such as clarification and reflection are often used to help avoid misunderstandings.  (See our further pages:  What is Counselling? , Clarification and Reflection for more information on these topics).

We are all capable of empathic listening and may practise it with friends, family and colleagues.  Showing empathy is a desirable trait in many interpersonal relationships – you may well feel more comfortable talking about your own feelings and emotions with a particular person.  They are likely to be better at listening empathetically to you than others, this is often based on similar perspectives, experiences, beliefs and values – a good friend, your spouse, a parent or sibling for example.

Further Reading from Skills You Need

Our Communication Skills eBooks

Learn more about the key communication skills you need to be a more effective communicator.

Our eBooks are ideal for anyone who wants to learn about or develop their interpersonal skills and are full of easy-to-follow, practical information.

Other Listening Types

Although usually less important or useful in interpersonal relationships there are other types of listening, these include:

Appreciative Listening

Appreciative listening is listening for enjoyment.  A good example is listening to music, especially as a way to relax. (See our page: Music Therapy for more about using music as a relaxation therapy) .

Rapport Listening

When trying to build rapport with others we can engage in a type of listening that encourages the other person to trust and like us. A salesman, for example, may make an effort to listen carefully to what you are saying as a way to promote trust and potentially make a sale.  This type of listening is common in situations of negotiation. (See: Building Rapport and Negotiation Skills for more information) .

Selective Listening

This is a more negative type of listening, it implies that the listener is somehow biased to what they are hearing.  Bias can be based on preconceived ideas or emotionally difficult communications.  Selective listening is a sign of failing communication – you cannot hope to understand if you have filtered out some of the message and may reinforce or strengthen your bias for future communications.

Continue to: 10 Principles of Listening Barriers to Effective Listening

See also: Mindful Listening Active Listening Barriers to Effective Communication

Week 7: Listening and Responding

Listening critically, learning objectives.

• Define and explain critical listening and its importance in the public speaking context.
• Understand six distinct ways to improve your ability to critically listen to speeches.
• Evaluate what it means to be an ethical listener.

As a student, you are exposed to many kinds of messages. You receive messages conveying academic information, institutional rules, instructions, and warnings; you also receive messages through political discourse, advertisements, gossip, jokes, song lyrics, text messages, invitations, web links, and all other manner of communication. You know it’s not all the same, but it isn’t always clear how to separate the truth from the messages that are misleading or even blatantly false. Nor is it always clear which messages are intended to help the listener and which ones are merely self-serving for the speaker. Part of being a good listener is to learn when to use caution in evaluating the messages we hear.

Critical listening in this context means using careful, systematic thinking and reasoning to see whether a message makes sense in light of factual evidence. Critical listening can be learned with practice but is not necessarily easy to do. Some people never learn this skill; instead, they take every message at face value even when those messages are in conflict with their knowledge. Problems occur when messages are repeated to others who have not yet developed the skills to discern the difference between a valid message and a mistaken one. Critical listening can be particularly difficult when the message is complex. Unfortunately, some speakers may make their messages intentionally complex to avoid critical scrutiny. For example, a city treasurer giving a budget presentation might use very large words and technical jargon, which make it difficult for listeners to understand the proposed budget and ask probing questions.

Six Ways to Improve Your Critical Listening

Critical listening is first and foremost a skill that can be learned and improved. In this section, we are going to explore six different techniques you can use to become a more critical listener.

Recognizing the Difference between Facts and Opinions

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan is credited with saying, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts.” [1] Part of critical listening is learning to separate opinions from facts, and this works two ways: critical listeners are aware of whether a speaker is delivering a factual message or a message based on opinion, and they are also aware of the interplay between their own opinions and facts as they listen to messages.

In American politics, the issue of health care reform is heavily laden with both opinions and facts, and it is extremely difficult to sort some of them out. A clash of fact versus opinion happened on September 9, 2010, during President Obama’s nationally televised speech to a joint session of Congress outlining his health care reform plan. In this speech, President Obama responded to several rumors about the plan, including the claim “that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false—the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.” At this point, one congressman yelled out, “You lie!” Clearly, this congressman did not have a very high opinion of either the health care reform plan or the president. However, when the nonpartisan watch group Factcheck.org examined the language of the proposed bill, they found that it had a section titled “No Federal Payment for Undocumented Aliens.” [2]

Often when people have a negative opinion about a topic, they are unwilling to accept facts. Instead, they question all aspects of the speech and have a negative predisposition toward both the speech and the speaker.

This is not to say that speakers should not express their opinions. Many of the greatest speeches in history include personal opinions. Consider, for example, Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, in which he expressed his personal wish for the future of American society. Critical listeners may agree or disagree with a speaker’s opinions, but the point is that they know when a message they are hearing is based on opinion and when it is factual.

Uncovering Assumptions

If something is factual, supporting evidence exists. However, we still need to be careful about what evidence does and does not mean. Assumptions are gaps in a logical sequence that listeners passively fill with their own ideas and opinions and may or may not be accurate. When listening to a public speech, you may find yourself being asked to assume something is a fact when in reality many people question that fact. For example, suppose you’re listening to a speech on weight loss. The speaker talks about how people who are overweight are simply not motivated or lack the self-discipline to lose weight. The speaker has built the speech on the assumption that motivation and self-discipline are the only reasons why people can’t lose weight. You may think to yourself, what about genetics? By listening critically, you will be more likely to notice unwarranted assumptions in a speech, which may prompt you to question the speaker if questions are taken or to do further research to examine the validity of the speaker’s assumptions. If, however, you sit passively by and let the speaker’s assumptions go unchallenged, you may find yourself persuaded by information that is not factual.

When you listen critically to a speech, you might hear information that appears unsupported by evidence. You shouldn’t accept that information unconditionally. You would accept it under the condition that the speaker offers credible evidence that directly supports it.

Table 1. Facts vs. Assumptions

Be Open to New Ideas

Sometimes people are so fully invested in their perceptions of the world that they are unable to listen receptively to messages that make sense and would be of great benefit to them. Human progress has been possible, sometimes against great odds, because of the mental curiosity and discernment of a few people. In the late 1700s when the technique of vaccination to prevent smallpox was introduced, it was opposed by both medical professionals and everyday citizens who staged public protests. [3] More than two centuries later, vaccinations against smallpox, diphtheria, polio, and other infectious diseases have saved countless lives, yet popular opposition continues.

In the world of public speaking, we must be open to new ideas. Let’s face it, people have a tendency to filter out information they disagree with and to filter in information that supports what they already believe. Nicolaus Copernicus was a sixteenth-century astronomer who dared to publish a treatise explaining that the earth revolves around the sun, which was a violation of Catholic doctrine. Copernicus’s astronomical findings were labeled heretical and his treatise banned because a group of people at the time were not open to new ideas. In May of 2010, almost five hundred years after his death, the Roman Catholic Church admitted its error and reburied his remains with the full rites of Catholic burial. [4]

While the Copernicus case is a fairly dramatic reversal, listeners should always be open to new ideas. We are not suggesting that you have to agree with every idea that you are faced with in life; rather, we are suggesting that you at least listen to the message and then evaluate the message.

Rely on Reason and Common Sense

If you are listening to a speech and your common sense tells you that the message is illogical, you very well might be right. You should be thinking about whether the speech seems credible and coherent. In this way, your use of common sense can act as a warning system for you.

One of our coauthors once heard a speech on the environmental hazards of fireworks. The speaker argued that fireworks (the public kind, not the personal kind people buy and set off in their backyards) were environmentally hazardous because of litter. Although there is certainly some paper that makes it to the ground before burning up, the amount of litter created by fireworks displays is relatively small compared to other sources of litter, including trash left behind by all the spectators watching fireworks at public parks and other venues. It just does not make sense to identify a few bits of charred paper as a major environmental hazard.

If the message is inconsistent with things you already know, if the argument is illogical, or if the language is exaggerated, you should investigate the issues before accepting or rejecting the message. Often, you will not be able to take this step during the presentation of the message; it may take longer to collect enough knowledge to make that decision for yourself.

However, when you are the speaker, you should not substitute common sense for evidence. That’s why during a speech it’s necessary to cite the authority of scholars whose research is irrefutable, or at least highly credible. It is all too easy to make a mistake in reasoning, sometimes called fallacy, in stating your case. We will discuss these fallacies in more detail in Chapter 8 “Supporting Ideas and Building Arguments”. One of the most common fallacies is post hoc, ergo propter hoc , a “common sense” form of logic that translates roughly as “after the fact, therefore because of the fact.” The argument says that if A happened first, followed by B, then A caused B. We know the outcome cannot occur earlier than the cause, but we also know that the two events might be related indirectly or that causality works in a different direction. For instance, imagine a speaker arguing that because the sun rises after a rooster’s crow, the rooster caused the sun to rise. This argument is clearly illogical because roosters crow many times each day, and the sun’s rising and setting do not change according to crowing or lack thereof. But the two events are related in a different way. Roosters tend to wake up and begin crowing at first light, about forty-five minutes before sunrise. Thus it is the impending sunrise that causes the predawn crowing.

In Chapter 2 “Ethics Matters: Understanding the Ethics of Public Speaking,” we pointed out that what is “common sense” for people of one generation or culture may be quite the opposite for people of a different generation or culture. Thus it is important not to assume that your audience shares the beliefs that are, for you, common sense. Likewise, if the message of your speech is complex or controversial, you should consider the needs of your audience and do your best to explain its complexities factually and logically, not intuitively.

Relate New Ideas to Old Ones

As both a speaker and a listener, one of the most important things you can do to understand a message is to relate new ideas to previously held ideas. Imagine you’re giving a speech about biological systems and you need to use the term “homeostasis,” which refers to the ability of an organism to maintain stability by making constant adjustments. To help your audience understand homeostasis, you could show how homeostasis is similar to adjustments made by the thermostats that keep our homes at a more or less even temperature. If you set your thermostat for seventy degrees and it gets hotter, the central cooling will kick in and cool your house down. If your house gets below seventy degrees, your heater will kick in and heat your house up. Notice that in both cases your thermostat is making constant adjustments to stay at seventy degrees. Explaining that the body’s homeostasis works in a similar way will make it more relevant to your listeners and will likely help them both understand and remember the idea because it links to something they have already experienced.

If you can make effective comparisons while you are listening, it can deepen your understanding of the message. If you can provide those comparisons for your listeners, you make it easier for them to give consideration to your ideas.

Note-taking is a skill that improves with practice. You already know that it’s nearly impossible to write down everything a speaker says. In fact, in your attempt to record everything, you might fall behind and wish you had divided your attention differently between writing and listening.

Careful, selective note-taking is important because we want an accurate record that reflects the meanings of the message. However much you might concentrate on the notes, you could inadvertently leave out an important word, such as not , and undermine the reliability of your otherwise carefully written notes. Instead, if you give the same care and attention to listening, you are less likely to make that kind of a mistake.

It’s important to find a balance between listening well and taking good notes. Many people struggle with this balance for a long time. For example, if you try to write down only key phrases instead of full sentences, you might find that you can’t remember how two ideas were related. In that case, too few notes were taken. At the opposite end, extensive note-taking can result in a loss of emphasis on the most important ideas.

To increase your critical listening skills, continue developing your ability to identify the central issues in messages so that you can take accurate notes that represent the meanings intended by the speaker.

Listening Ethically

Ethical listening rests heavily on honest intentions. We should extend to speakers the same respect we want to receive when it’s our turn to speak. We should be facing the speaker with our eyes open. We should not be checking our cell phones. We should avoid any behavior that belittles the speaker or the message.

Scholars Stephanie Coopman and James Lull emphasize the creation of a climate of caring and mutual understanding, observing that “respecting others’ perspectives is one hallmark of the effective listener.” [5] Respect, or unconditional positive regard for others, means that you treat others with consideration and decency whether you agree with them or not. Professors Sprague, Stuart, and Bodary [6] also urge us to treat the speaker with respect even when we disagree, don’t understand the message, or find the speech boring.

Doug Lipman (1998), [7] a storytelling coach, wrote powerfully and sensitively about listening in his book:

Like so many of us, I used to take listening for granted, glossing over this step as I rushed into the more active, visible ways of being helpful. Now, I am convinced that listening is the single most important element of any helping relationship. Listening has great power. It draws thoughts and feelings out of people as nothing else can. When someone listens to you well, you become aware of feelings you may not have realized that you felt. You have ideas you may have never thought before. You become more eloquent, more insightful.… As a helpful listener, I do not interrupt you. I do not give advice. I do not do something else while listening to you. I do not convey distraction through nervous mannerisms. I do not finish your sentences for you. In spite of all my attempts to understand you, I do not assume I know what you mean. I do not convey disapproval, impatience, or condescension. If I am confused, I show a desire for clarification, not dislike for your obtuseness. I do not act vindicated when you misspeak or correct yourself. I do not sit impassively, withholding participation. Instead, I project affection, approval, interest, and enthusiasm. I am your partner in communication. I am eager for your imminent success, fascinated by your struggles, forgiving of your mistakes, always expecting the best. I am your delighted listener. [8]

This excerpt expresses the decency with which people should treat each other. It doesn’t mean we must accept everything we hear, but ethically, we should refrain from trivializing each other’s concerns. We have all had the painful experience of being ignored or misunderstood. This is how we know that one of the greatest gifts one human can give to another is listening.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Critical listening is the process a listener goes through using careful, systematic thinking and reasoning to see whether a speaker’s message makes sense in light of factual evidence. When listeners are not critical of the messages they are attending to, they are more likely to be persuaded by illogical arguments based on opinions and not facts.
• Critical listening can be improved by employing one or more strategies to help the listener analyze the message: recognize the difference between facts and opinions, uncover assumptions given by the speaker, be open to new ideas, use both reason and common sense when analyzing messages, relate new ideas to old ones, and take useful notes.
• Being an ethical listener means giving respectful attention to the ideas of a speaker, even though you may not agree with or accept those ideas.
• Think of a time when you were too tired or distracted to give your full attention to the ideas in a speech. What did you do? What should you have done?
• Give an example of a mistake in reasoning that involved the speaker mistaking an assumption for fact.
• Wikiquote. (n.d.). Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Retrieved from http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Daniel_Patrick_Moynihan ↵
• Factcheck.org, a Project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. (2009, September 10). Obama’s health care speech. Retrieved from http://www.factcheck.org/2009/09/obamas-health-care-speech ↵
• Edward Jenner Museum. (n.d.). Vaccination. Retrieved from http://www.jennermuseum.com/Jenner/vaccination.html ↵
• Owen, R. (2010, May 23). Catholic church reburies “heretic” Nicolaus Copernicus with honour. Times Online . Retrieved from http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article7134341.ece ↵
• Coopman, S. J., & Lull, J. (2008). Public speaking: The evolving art . Cengage Learning, p. 60. ↵
• Sprague, J., Stuart, D., & Bodary, D. (2010). The speaker’s handbook (9th ed.). Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage. ↵
• Lippman, D. (1998). The storytelling coach: How to listen, praise, and bring out people’s best . Little Rock, AR: August House. ↵
• Lippman, D. (1998). The storytelling coach: How to listen, praise, and bring out people’s best . Little Rock, AR: August House, pp. 110–111. ↵
• Public Speaking: Practice and Ethics. Authored by : Anonymous. Provided by : Anonymous. Located at : http://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/public-speaking-practice-and-ethics/ . License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

How to Practice Active Listening: 16 Examples & Techniques

Do you wonder if you could be better?

Good listeners can stay present and engaged with what is being said. This article will describe a listening technique called active listening. It’s useful in building therapeutic relationships and creating empathy.

You will learn the benefits of active listening and how it makes you a better communicator. And we will provide a list of the skills needed and techniques to learn exactly how to practice this. Finally, we’ll go over common pitfalls that keep us from being good listeners.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Positive Communication Exercises (PDF) for free . These science-based tools will help you and those you work with build better social skills and better connect with others.

This Article Contains:

What is active listening 3 principles, is it important in communication 4 benefits, active listening skills you can foster, 7 techniques to train your active listening skills, 3 counseling exercises & activities, 3 worksheets to practice active listening, questions to ask others: 3 examples, possible barriers & psychology tips to overcome them, 3 courses for training on effective communication, resources from positivepsychology.com, a take-home message.

Often, while we are listening, we are thinking of how we will respond. We might get distracted and miss some of what was said. We may not be paying much attention to the nonverbal communication cues of the speaker.

Active listening requires the listener to pay close attention to what is being communicated verbally and nonverbally. The listener is encouraged to interpret not only the content of what is being said, but also the emotions present and the body language.

In order to achieve this, the listener must be willing to devote energy to the task. They will need to have an excellent attention span and honed empathic abilities . Active listening has even been referred to as the “measurable dimension of empathy” (Olson & Iwasiw, 1987, p. 104).

There are three main components of successful active listening (Rogers & Farson, 1987):

• Listen for total meaning When someone is conveying a message, there are two meanings to gather: the content and the feeling or attitude underlying the message. An active listener is not only tuned in to the information conveyed, but also how it is conveyed and any nonverbal cues present.
• Respond to feelings After listening, when a response is appropriate, the listener should respond to the feeling of what was said. In this way, the speaker feels understood and empathy is established.
• Note all cues Nonverbal cues include tone of voice, facial or body expressions, and speed of speech. All of these taken together can convey a much deeper meaning than merely the content of what was said.

Carl Rogers’s take on active listening

Psychologists Carl Rogers and Richard Farson (1987) are responsible for defining the concept of active listening. They describe the skill as vitally important for effective communication. For Rogers, the ultimate goal of active listening was to foster positive change (Rogers & Farson, 1987). This change can occur in the context of a client/helper relationship or in the context of a group.

Rogers described three important principles in effective counseling: empathy, genuineness, and unconditional positive regard . Active listening is a tool that fosters and supports these principles.

Empathy is demonstrated in active listening by the listener reflecting the thoughts and feelings of the speaker. These thoughts and feelings are believed, supported, and respected. They are not dismissed or challenged.

Rogers stresses that in order to be successful in active listening, the listener must be authentic in their care. This reflects the principle of genuineness. Active listening can’t be faked.

Active listening requires true feelings of respect toward the individual speaking. The listener accepts and supports the speaker regardless of the content of their words. This illustrates the principle of unconditional positive regard.

It is also a skill that will benefit the listener in their life outside of work.

Whether at work or in casual conversation, active listening can provide a safe and empathetic space for a speaker, fostering feelings of trust.

Active listening in counseling

Active listening has been shown to be a vital skill in counseling. Empathy and empathic listening foster the therapeutic relationship , and the relationship between therapist and client has been shown to be the one of the most crucial and stable predictors of client success (Martin, Garske, & Davis, 2000).

Another benefit of learning active listening as a counselor is that it may increase self-efficacy . Levitt (2002) examined the impact of teaching active listening to counseling students and found that this skill created greater levels of confidence in the students and helped to reduce their anxiety as new counselors.

Active listening in the workplace

Kubota, Mishima, and Nagata (2004) examined the effects of an active listening training program on middle managers, finding positive results. In workplaces, a large portion of stress experienced by employees comes from interpersonal relationships.

The study showed that teaching managers who learned active listening skills were better able to support employees with mental health issues, providing a safe environment for them to share their difficulties without judgment. This led to calmer behaviors and more success (Kubota et al., 2004).

Can active listening skills even work through text conversations? Perhaps so. A unique and interesting study looked at the application of active listening to written communication online (Bauer & Figl, 2008). This case study was examining soft skills among computer science students and to see if active listening could come across in instant message conversations.

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Active listening requires a skill set that differs from typical everyday listening. Not only are you using the principles of empathy, genuineness, and unconditional positive regard, but you must also develop certain skillful ways of interacting.

It’s useful to begin with the body language of the listener (Robertson, 2005). How do you know when someone is listening to you? Maintaining eye contact and appropriate facial expressions is important to convey empathy and attention. As with all aspects of active listening, these indicators shouldn’t be forced or faked. They are simply a reflection of your genuine attentiveness.

It also helps to remove distractions from the environment. Depending on the context, you may desire to set up an environment that conveys peace and quiet. If you are in a public place, putting away distractions or moving to a quieter location can also be helpful.

Another skill is following (Robertson, 2005). To actively follow what the speaker is conveying, you allow space for them to speak, reducing or eliminating questions and giving space for silence .

In a non-active listening situation, there may be quick back and forth, many rapid questions, or people may talk over one another. With active listening, the speaker is given the time and space to speak as much as they want. And they are encouraged to continue.

A third skill is reflecting (Robertson, 2005). This is the skill of repeating what you heard the speaker say, but avoiding parroting it back verbatim. You are trying to capture the essence of what they said and reflect it back to them. You may also try to capture the feelings that are conveyed.

This is always done without expressing judgment and with the goal of understanding. It may even be useful to ask if you have it right before asking them to continue.

Each technique is listed with an example and an explanation of the use.

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Use the below suggestions to help your clients improve their listening.

Practicing with a partner

For counselors in training, it is important to practice active listening with a partner. One partner shares a story of something emotional that happened, and the listener will practice the following techniques:

• Demonstrating listening through body language and nonverbal responses
• Reflecting back the content of what the partner shared
• Reflecting back the emotions that the partner shared

It’s important to check in with your partner after you’ve reflected to be sure that it’s accurate.

Mindful listening group practice

In many ways, active listening is a mindfulness practice. The listener is trying to stay focused on the present, with what is being shared. And they are working to accomplish this without judgment.

Here is an excellent activity to practice mindful listening in a group.

• Have the group sit in a circle.
• Offer an ice breaker question or prompt, such as something they are grateful for today.
• Rather than go around the circle, ask participants to share spontaneously when they feel ready.
• Invite them to notice if they are thinking about their answer, rather than listening.
• Ask them to be present with the person who is sharing.
• Challenge them to notice if they are uncomfortable with the silences.

Mindful listening alone

At any moment, you can drop in and practice mindful listening. Simply stop what you are doing, close your eyes, and try to see how many sounds you can hear around you and within you. Notice if there are judgments arising and try not to attach to them. Stay with the flow of sounds for as long as you can.

Listening Accurately

This worksheet offers a five-step process to improve your communication skills with another person. It would be a useful tool for working with couples or anyone who would like to hone their listening skills.

The five steps are:

• Step in their shoes.
• Fact-check your interpretation.
• Give your full attention.
• Clarify what they’ve said.
• Clarify what you’ve said.

500 Years Ago

This creative exercise helps both the listener and the speaker develop their empathy by imagining themselves in someone else’s place.

The listener is instructed to pretend that they have come from the past, 500 years ago. The speaker is trying to explain something to them and must use language that they can understand.

Using Small Rewards

In working to create a therapeutic alliance, nonverbal communication is key. This worksheet lists some “small rewards,” subtle but powerful nonverbal gestures that the therapist can use to let their client know that they hear them and are following along.

The worksheet invites the practitioner to listen to a five-minute segment of their session and see how often they were using these nonverbal cues. There is space to reflect on how better to incorporate them and consider why there may have been trouble.

How to actively listen to others – Scott Pierce

Active listening starts with refraining from questions. It’s important that the stage be set by allowing the speaker enough time and space to speak.

Start with reflection

Begin with reflections and try to capture the feeling of what was said. A reflection mirrors back what the person just said and tries to capture the meaning or the tone.

For example, let’s say a friend comes to you about a fight she had with her husband. She describes how the argument got heated, and they ended up sleeping separately. She is feeling worried about the state of their marriage.

A reflection restates what she said: “Things got really heated last night – so bad you didn’t even want to be in the same room.” Or “You’re feeling really worried because this fight felt so intense.”

The first example is a reflection of the content of what was shared. The second reflects the emotions. These types of reflections validate the speaker and help them feel heard and understood.

Asking questions

Only after reflection has been done will it be time to ask questions. The types of questions are important. The purpose of questions during active listening is to continue to move the individual toward self-discovery.

Open questions are vital for this step. Open questions can’t be answered with a simple yes or no. They invite introspection. Powerful questions stimulate curiosity in the listener and encourage conversation. They reveal underlying assumptions and invite creativity. They don’t change the subject or close down the conversation.

The point of an open-ended question as part of active listening is to learn more and continue to connect with the speaker. It is not to drive the conversation in a particular direction.

Here are three examples of closed questions vs open questions to ask, given the above situation. Remember, your friend just told you about a terrible fight that she had with her husband, and she is upset.

Closed question: “Did you make up?” Open question: “How are you feeling about the fight today?”

Closed question: “Did your kids hear you?” Open question: “How does it feel to share this with me? Have you thought about talking to anyone else?”

Closed question: “Are you going to leave him?” Open question: “What sorts of responses or solutions are you considering?”

You can see that the open questions invite conversation and show compassion , whereas the closed questions seem more like information gathering.

When practicing active listening, practitioners should also self-monitor for judgments that might come up while the person is speaking.

If these judgments aren’t monitored, they may cause criticizing, labeling, diagnosing, or even praising in a way that leads the speaker (Robertson, 2005).

The goal of active listening is to create a safe environment for the individual to speak freely. Any of these responses may lead to defensiveness, distrust, or shutting down.

Another barrier is suggesting solutions (Robertson, 2005). Although it may seem well meaning, the urge to suggest solutions often comes from a discomfort with what the speaker is saying. While it may seem supportive, it creates an imbalance of power in the dynamic. The speaker is left feeling unheard, and they are disempowered to create their own solutions.

A third barrier is avoiding what the person is sharing. This may manifest as diverting the conversation away, logically arguing, or even reassuring. Again, while reassurance seems comforting, it often shuts down or ends the conversation for the other person.

A wonderful example of the comparison of empathetic and other responses can be found in Brené Brown’s video below about sympathy versus empathy.

Active listening is a straightforward skill, and taking a short course is the perfect way to learn how to do it effectively. While it is possible to learn it simply by reading, it’s always helpful to see it in action and practice with other people.

If you are hoping to learn active listening to improve your workplace as a manager or a leader, these courses would be great for you.

Udemy offers thousands of short courses on everything from programming to cooking, and this course on active listening has over 10,000 downloads.

LinkedIn Learning offers courses for businesses, including one on effective listening . Your team can take a listening assessment, address challenges that they have, and learn effective listening behaviors.

A wonderful course for in-depth active listening training is offered by Voice of Health (VOH). VOH is an online peer-support community that offers free training for anyone interested.

17 Exercises To Develop Positive Communication

17 Positive Communication Exercises [PDFs] to help others develop communication skills for successful social interactions and positive, fulfilling relationships.

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Our Positive Psychology Toolkit© has excellent resources for learning how to listen more effectively and empathetically. One such tool is the exercise Listening Without Trying to Solve .

This exercise is done with a group. Individuals are paired off with one person as the listener and one as the storyteller. Each listener is given a card with instructions, half are told to listen without trying to solve and half are told to try to solve the problem as best as they can. Each pair is given five minutes for the storyteller to share a problem.

After sharing, the group returns together and discusses how it felt to be on the receiving end of a person who is working hard to solve the problem vs someone who is fully listening and empathizing. This is a powerful activity to show the effectiveness of active listening.

This checklist is a helpful tool for practicing active listening techniques. The checklist lists the techniques and then asks the listener to check back to see if they successfully used each one. There is space to write what worked well, what was difficult, and how to better incorporate unused techniques.

If you’re looking for more science-based ways to help others communicate better, this collection contains 17 validated positive communication tools for practitioners. Use them to help others improve their communication skills and form deeper and more positive relationships.

Active listening is a skill that anyone can learn. It’s a vital tool for therapists and counselors to connect empathically with their clients. But it’s also useful for better communication with family, friends, and coworkers.

Practicing active listening can deepen connections in your relationships and help to create stronger and more lasting bonds. Try some of these exercises to improve your communication skills today.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Positive Communication Exercises (PDF) for free .

• Bauer, C., & Figl, K. (2008). ‘Active listening’ in written online communication-a case study in a course on ‘soft skills’ for computer scientists. In 2008 38th Annual Frontiers in Education Conference (pp. F2C–1). IEEE.
• Kubota, S., Mishima, N., & Nagata, S. (2004). A study of the effects of active listening on listening attitudes of middle managers. Journal of Occupational Health , 46 (1), 60–67.
• Levitt, D. H. (2002). Active listening and counselor self-efficacy: Emphasis on one microskill in beginning counselor training. The Clinical Supervisor , 20 (2), 101–115.
• Martin, D. J., Garske, J. P., & Davis, M. K. (2000). Relation of the therapeutic alliance with outcome and other variables: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology , 68 (3), 438–450.
• Olson, J. K., & Iwasiw, C. L. (1987). Effects of a training model on active listening skills of post-RN students. Journal of Nursing Education , 26 (3), 104–107.
• Robertson, K. (2005). Active listening: More than just paying attention. Australian Family Physician , 34 (12), 1053–1055.
• Rogers, C. R., & Farson, R. E. (1987). Active listening. In R. G. Newman, M. A. Danziger, & M. Cohen (Eds.), Communicating in business today . DC Heath & Company.

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