Barriers to Listening

Scanlans difficulty to be effective was not because he did not possess the ability to listen but he allowed bias of a situation to selectively, not hear what his peers were trying to convey. Scanlan (2011) goes on to say that, people are confused about listening most of the time. Moreover, the confusion prevents the focus and distorts the direction as well as vision.

The six barriers of effective communication are, 1)Physical barriers 2)Language barriers 3)Body language barriers 4)Perceptual barriers 5)Organizational barriers 6)Cultural barriers. In my opinion I believe that the easiest barriers to surmount are the physical barrier. Often people act as if nothing is bothering them, and the can hide their physical discomforts.

There are four basic barriers that hinder effective communication, emotional barriers, physical barriers, semantic barriers, and ineffective listening. All of these barriers separately or combined can contribute to a lack of effective communication.

Listening is not the same as hearing. Take time to listen carefully to what others are saying through both their verbal and non-verbal communication.

Provide 3 signs of poor listening seem throughout the film. Provide ways that their listening could be improved.

Male and female differ in their use of communication because their reasons for communicating are different. Men

In order to be able to solve some of the problems associated with gender miscommunications, we should distinguish first between the two different types of communications: verbal communication and nonverbal communication. Verbal communication consists of messages expressed by linguistic means such as the use of intonation, the specific words we choose to say, and the way we are saying them. There are differences in females and males usage of language/verbal communication. As we might expect from traditional sex-role stereotypes, girls tend to establish more egalitarian same-sex groups. Girls use friendly groups as a training ground for cooperation. Boys view friendly conversation among their friends as training for verbal aggression. Females are more verbal, use three times more amount of words than males, they are much more descriptive and use more adjectives. Women are less direct in their communication style. As Prof. Tannen showed in one of her research, women are more indirect in answering questions depends on the situation. They answer questions the way they would like to be answered by men, which means more than just a yes/no answer. However, men answer the way they would like to be answered

This causes women to become more vocal. Tannen suggests that status affects many different ways in which men communicate and raises several different examples. One area she found was that men tell more stories and jokes than women. She suggests that they are not doing this to be funny but instead do it to again to negotiate status. They often tell stories in which they are the heroes and act alone to overcome obstacles. While women use storytelling to gain support from her personal networks. They use their stories that, if they are the subject of, contain her doing something foolish to put her at the same level as the listener. In this way women are not concerned with status as with relating and gaining support. Men and women also differ when they are listening. While women tend to use eye contact and head nods to let the speaker know that she is listening. Men often do not use these techniques because they suggest agreement with the speaker. Women also a technique which Tannen calls cooperative overlap. This happens sometimes when women start to speak before the other person finishers speaking. They usually do this to agree and show support for what the speaker is saying. Women see cooperative overlap as a way to continue the conversation while men see it as a competitive ploy to gain control of that conversation. In this way communication again is not made clear, men are annoyed because they believe that

Listening is often confused with hearing. This serious misconception can lead us to believe that good listening is instinctive. In fact, good listening is an active, sophisticated process – a learned behavior – that demands focus and attention. Listening takes place on

People tend to process incoming information quicker than its output by the speaker causing them to quickly jump to conclusions, evaluate, or predict what will be said next. "Most individuals speak at the rate of 175 to 200 words per minute. However, research suggests that we are very capable of listening and processing words at the rate of 6000 to 1,000 words per minute....This unused brain power can be a barrier to effective listening, causing the auditor to miss or misinterpret what others are saying."(Lewis 2003). Listeners are often side tracked when listening, whether it be internal or external distractions. People have a habit of only listening to what they want to hear instead of what is actually being said.

There exists a disparity in the communication phenomenon between men and women. This disparity according to scholars can be attributed to the male dominance in the society today and relationship tensions between couples. A study on cross-sex conversations showed that, when men and women engage in a friendly conversation, they do so as equals but they do not play the same roles in the communication. Women tend to ask more questions and likely to utter utterances that encourage responses from the other speaker. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to interrupt their partner’s conversations and make direct opinions and facts to control or dominate the conversation. Thus, the communication phenomenon between men and women is strikingly distinct.

Glass begins with a prearranged true-false quiz which shows how many of our preconceived biases about differences between the sexes and how they communicate are actually false (Glass, 1994). Glass (1994) states that women are not statistically shown to be more intuitive than men. However, they have been discovered to be more detail oriented in both their

Listening is more complex, and it encourages one to analyze and think about an idea, rather than to simply accept it (or “hear” it). Hearing is a skill that is beneficial for every aspect of life. As long as we have our ability to hear, we will always perceive different sounds, music, and voices. Listening, however, is beneficial to us in specific instances. It is important for us to attain good listening skills in education, the work force, and in our relationships with others in order to succeed. Good listening in education will bring about confident participation in class discussions; good listening in the workplace will lead to cooperation and good teamwork among colleagues; good listening in relationships is healthy and positive, for it is important to hear what an individual has to say in order to know how they feel.

Before Golen’s study, no studies determined factors of barriers to effective listening, but many studies showed factors or groups of similar listening behaviors. A study of 127 college students, done by Barker, Watson, and Kibler (1984) found that delivery, credibility, speaker’s voice, interestingness, understandability, and clarity were used to determine speaker effectiveness by listeners.

1. physical barriers 2. psychological barriers 3. language problems 4. nonverbal distractions 5. thought speed 6. faking attention 7. grandstanding