Resources for Faculty: Listening
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Primer
College instructors are “comfortable” teaching writing and speaking. By that I mean, they
believe that these are activities that it is appropriate to address in a Higher Education classroom.
Reading, a skill many college students needs a great deal of assistance with, is sometimes viewed as beneath
the Higher Education level, although that attitude is changing as faculty realize that “critical
reading” skills are not what K-12 classes stress and, because these skills may be to some extent
discipline-specific and, therefore, there is much the science instructor or the social science instructor
might be able to contribute that presupposes a level of sophistication that college students will reach at
some point during the four years of their undergraduate career. If reading is paired with writing, then
listening is paired with speaking. Listening, however, is neither taught at the college level nor ignored as
too basic. Listening is simply ignored.
Why is listening ignored? Probably for two reasons: first, since we have been listening since birth, we
presuppose that this is a skill necessarily learned long ago; second, since we have never been taught
listening in a classroom setting, we don’t have a clue as to what instruction in listening might be
like. It is unfortunate, however, that listening is ignored because it is very important. Ask yourself the
following question: of the four activities of reading, writing, listening, and speaking, which one do we do
the most of in academe? The answer is listening, with speaking second and reading third. We should wonder
then at a typical college curriculum that spends its time on these skills in the exact opposite order,
privileging the least frequent one, writing, over reading and speaking and spending almost no time at all on
the most frequent one, listening.
What is Listening?
Listening is really not one “activity” but five. First, we must hear. The relevant sound
waves must strike our hearing apparati. Those who sit in the far corner of a lecture hall or those whose ears
are being bombarded with sound waves other than the relevant ones may well not hear. Second, we must attend
to what we hear. We must choose to process the sound waves as a meaningful message. Third, we must understand
this message. If one reaches this third step, then one is accomplishing what many people think of as listening.
However, listening as an academic skill should go two steps beyond just understanding the message. Fourth, we
should evaluate the message. Is it important or unimportant? Is it connected to other information I have or
disconnected? Fifth, we should know the message, and knowing it means more than being able to repeat it.
Knowing it means that, based on critical evaluation of worth and relevance, we can use the information.
Imagine a literature class. The instructor says the Old English poetry used a four-beat line. A student
must hear this message, not allowing himself/herself to be distracted by the group of students who are
talking in the hall outside the classroom. A student must choose to process this message not as noise but as
a meaningful group of sounds. A student then must understand what that meaning is. A student must, however,
do more. He/she must figure out if this is a trivial fact or an important characteristic of Old English
verse. If the latter, a student must connect the fact with what he/she knows about verse in general. Is Old
English verse different from verse encountered in other periods of English literature? From that in other
literatures? A student might then imagine how the message might become part of a longer discussion of
versification or a tool helpful in interpreting (or enacting) Old English verse or a clue as to whether
poetry encountered later is from the Old English period or some other period. If the verse’s language
has been modernized but the rhythm preserved (which is frequently the case), the presence of four beats might
help the student place a passage in the correct time frame. All of these are ways the message that has been
heard, attended to, understood, and evaluated might be used. When it can be so used, it is known.
Barriers to Effective Listening
Effective listening, as described above, may sound as if it’s just a matter of doing the work.
Those who aren’t effective don’t work sufficiently hard to understand or don’t push beyond
understanding the information. Actually, there are many factors that can thwart the process that have little
if anything to do with how much effort the student expends. Let me review some of the barriers thrown up by
students and some of the barriers that students have no control over.
Student listeners—as well as other listeners—are often impatient. They want “the
facts” or “what’s on the test” and, as a result, tune-out material they judge to be
irrelevant. Well, that material is oftentimes quite valuable. It may, in fact, be necessary if one is to
understand “the facts.” These listeners are engaging in one kind of selective listening. There
are many. For example, listeners oftentimes only listen to information that confirms their existing beliefs
or their current opinions.
Listeners are, of course, not always at odds with those who are speaking. But sometimes they are. In such
a case, listeners’ defensiveness can lead to selective listening. The listeners only hear what they
want to hear. Another phenomenon can occur when speaker and listener are opposed: the listener will start
preparing his/her response, and, while doing that, not listen to what else the speaker might be saying. Those
who write about listening refer to this metaphorically as “reloading.”
Listeners also can get into trouble if they are not in the habit of monitoring their listening behavior.
Listening, as we will discuss in a minute, is an active process: there are behaviors one should enact while
listening. Listeners who are high in self-monitoring will be consciously aware that they are performing these
tasks and ready to resume them should they find they’ve faded away for a moment.
A number of things can cause this “fade.” If the listener lacks the context for understanding
what is being presented, he/she will be inclined to fade. If the listener holds values or assumptions
different from those of the speaker, she/he will be inclined to fade. The listener may, in a case such as
this one, not value the information being shared because he/she doesn’t share the values and
assumptions it is premised on. For example, students may come to a first-year writing class expecting to
learn how to write creatively. These students may not value academic writing much. Should the writing class
be one that focuses on academic writing because this writing is what students will be asked to do for the
remainder of their college career, these students might not listen much or well. The lack of shared
assumptions and values in such a case will result in a great deal of non-listening.
And, of course, students and other listeners may fade if they are tired.
A number of environmental factors can also affect listening. If the seats are too comfortable or too
uncomfortable. If the room is too dark or too bright. If the room is too hot or too cold. All of these
factors can impede effective listening. So can not being able to see the person speaking or see that person
well.
“Noise” can also affect listening. I put “noise” in quotation marks because I am
using the term in two senses. Literally, noise can interfere—noise from outside the room; noise because
others in the room are carrying on a private conversation. However, “noise” is used in
communication studies to mean anything that interferes in the message getting from the speaker to the
listener. If, for example, the listener is emotionally upset and occasionally thinking about whatever it is
that has him/her upset, that is “noise.” So might be the attire of the speaker if it
is—let’say—too loud or too revealing. In other words, if it draws attention to itself and,
as a result, away from the message.
The difficulty of the information can impose an increasing barrier to effective listening. Initially, the
task will burden the listener, but, as he/she encounters new information that presupposes what was just
heard but not fully understood, the burden becomes greater. Listeners will almost inevitably tune-out.
Something similar occurs if the amount of information is too high for comfortable processing.
One last barrier is well worth noting—because it is important and because it is not one of the
barriers that readily comes to mind. There is a thought-speech differential. We can think more rapidly than
speakers speak. As a result, we may feel we have “extra time” to do something with while
listening. That extra time can be used to enhance listening. We’ll discuss how in a minute. However,
that extra time can be spent thinking about matters extraneous to the subject matter at-hand. Many people,
once they begin using this extra time for something extraneous, begin to fade from the listening task.
Strategies to Improve Listening
The thought-speech differential just mentioned is a crucial concept because it means that the listener
has available to him/her time to do other things. The key to improving listening then is to use this time to
do other things related to listening. The literature on listening suggests three possibilities.
First, students might be asked to engage in vocalized listening. This strategy has students talk
(silently, of course) along with the person they are listening to. Students don’t repeat what
they’re hearing; rather, they put the information into their own words, pose quick questions, and
perhaps guess where the speaker may be going next. This last possibility is especially powerful. Rhetorician
Kenneth Burke talks about how writers and speaker can enhance the persuasiveness of what they write and speak
by making the audience participants in the articulation of the discourse structure. What this
“fancy” phrasing means is making the audience feel truly with you as you move from part to part
through a piece of writing or a speech. To the extent the audience feels with you, the audience identifies
with you, and, according to Burke, identification is at the core of persuasiveness. Should listeners try to
get with writers and speakers in this manner, they would be meeting the rhetor halfway. The discourse would
be shared, and, as such, much less of it would potentially escape the listener.
Second, students might take notes effectively. “Effectively” is the key word. There are any
number of note-taking strategies one might suggest to students. One popular strategy is to use two columns
per page: one side for the notes; the other for comments on, questions about, or even an outline of the
notes. This second column is filled in after listening as part of an attempt to move the information from
listened to heard, attended to, and understood to evaluated and known. Also useful in effecting this
transition would be summary writing. Through summary writing, information is chunked and logical connections
are more strongly forged. Students might also profit from advice on both how to recognize the hierarchical
arrangement of information they’re hearing and how to reflect this in their notes. Recognizing
information hierarchy makes it much easier to chunk information and make logical connections.
Third, students might engage in critical listening activities. Critical listening has the audience testing
what they’re hearing, not just passively taking it all in. If a speaker uses evidence to support a
claim, listeners can use some of that extra time to ask if the authorities cited are qualified and without
bias, to ask if examples offered are numerically sufficient and representative, to ask if statistics used are
used responsibly. Listeners can also test causal claims, asking if there are multiple causes or if a claimed
causal relationship is really just a correlation. Listeners can in addition use some of the extra time to
identify emotional appeals that are being made or to identify biases and stereotypes in the speaker’s
presentation. Listeners who do work in these ways as they listen are staying focused and are using the extra
time they have to move the information along the path to evaluated and known.
Listening Styles
Not all people listen the same way, and it is valuable to know your listening style because it means that
there are certain things you’re more likely to hear than another in an audience and because it means
that there are certain things you’re inclined to miss. Those who study listening empirically and teach
listening skills suggest that there are four basic styles. Some listeners are people-focused. They will
remember who spoke and any interesting characteristic of these speakers. Some listeners are action-focused.
They will remember what was done or what was called for. Other listeners are content-focused. They will
remember the information that was presented. Still other listeners are time-focused. They will be watching
the clock and will remember how long speakers spoke and how long the lecture or the conversation or the
meeting took.
Imagine, if you will, a classroom lecture on and discussion of isolationism in U.S. foreign policy early
in the 20th Century. A people-focused listener will remember that a particular student argued for
isolationism now as a good strategy; an action-focused listener will recall what U.S. foreign policy actions
isolationists opposed; a content-focused listener will recall who back then was on which side and how
isolationism differed from WWI to WWII; and a time-oriented listener will recall that the lecturer spent 8
minutes talking about the Woodrow Wilson Museum in Staunton, VA. Each listener needs to try to become a bit
of the other three in order to maximize how much he/she gets out of such a lecture/discussion.
Sample Assignments
More to come, but here are three basic assignments:
- When lecturing, stop periodically and ask students to predict where lecture is going next. [Doing so
will encourage students to listen carefully, especially to clues you give as to the lecture’s overall
shape and its direction.]
- Have students take notes on a lecture or a part of a lecture on pages they then submit to you for
critique. Critique the accuracy of their notes, the fullness (too full? Not full enough? Not selectively
full?). Also critique the layout of their notes.
- Tell students that, in your lecture, there’s a claim you fail to support as well as a claim you
support with weak evidence. After lecture, ask students to identify these two claims. You might want to have
them write their answers out and, maybe, give them extra points for using critical listening skills to
discover the weak claims.
A Handout You Might Give Students
Listening
Barriers to Effective Listening
- Selective Listening
- " Reloading” (i.e. preparing what you’ll say next instead of listening)
- Poor Listening Environment
- Literal Noise
- Emotional “Noise”
Strategies to Improve Listening
- Vocalized Listening
- Note-taking
- Critical Listening (e.g. listening for and testing evidence for claims)
Evaluation Advice and Instruments
Many of the assignments listed under “Sample Assignments” are, in essence, evaluation tools.
You might also want to consider short-answer listening quizzes. These can be administered at the end of a
lecture; they can also be administered mid-lecture. Mid-lecture administration might prove more effective
because, if students discover how they are not “getting” the information that you deem important,
they might immediately change their listening behavior. If there’s a time gap between the quiz and the
next time you lecture, you may find that students have settled back into old patterns.