Listening Competence Case Study

SL.9-10.1, 3,6 Listening actively to spoken English language in a range of social and academic context.

As Sole describes in her book, Making Connections: Understanding Interpersonal Communication, ” Listening involves hearing, but it is much more than just the physiological act of your ears perceiving a sound and transmitting the auditory sensation to your brain. Listening is a complex psychological process that can be defined as the process of physically hearing, interpreting that sound, and understanding the significance of it. (Sole,K. 2011)

A vital aspect of interpersonal communication is the style in which one listens. While every individual possesses their own preferred method of listening in communication, it can be enlightening to analyze our own strengths and weaknesses so as to maximize effectual communication. Within the confines of four main listening style categories, I have chosen those which best describe my own personal listening style.

I plan to administer this assessment for my computer class through a recording like the ones I had made on Jing for you to listen to. I realize that the recordings are confusing because the window is so small, but I will have made the recordings and audio file rather than a video/Jing file like I did for this assignment.

Listening Skills - How we interpret both the verbal and non-verbal messages sent by others.

Given that listening accounts for 45 per cent of time spent on communication (Eunson 2012:310), argue the importance of listening skills in the workplace. Your analysis should identify three specific listening behaviors and provide examples to demonstrate how these skills promote communication and understanding. Support your analysis with relevant communication theory and evidence from appropriate academic sources.

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

Listening is to coherent speaking as reading is to effective writing. English and all other language irrespective of nation or dialect is a totality of four skills: Listening, reading, writing, speaking. Underwood (1989) simplified the definition of listening to "the activity of paying attention to and trying to get meaning from something we hear" (p. 1). Mendelsohn (1994) defines listening comprehension as ―the ability to understand the spoken language of native speakers.''

Listening is a vital element of communication and it is very much different from hearing sense of human. A meaningful communication requires both a good listener and a speaker. However, the effect of a listening style may vary depending on the occasions and situations a listener is in. Sometimes, speaker exhibit ineffective style such as defensiveness, ambushing, pseudo-listening, stage hogging and selective listening in their communication tracks.

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.

Listening is an important form of communication. Unfortunately, many people who do not know how to listen believe they can listen well. They often say "I have been doing this all of my life of course I can listen". Listening is not inherited, or a personality trait, it is a skill that must be worked on and practiced.

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.

Listening is more than just hearing. The process of listening involves receiving and constructing meaning, and responding to verbal and/or nonverbal messages. In other words, listening is not always easy and being a good listener is all about developing listening skills. To receive messages appropriately we have to listen actively. Active listening can be broken down into three important skills; first of all you have to reflect the feelings that the person is communicating, secondly reflect the content that they are communicating and finally ask good, meaningful questions.

The purpose of this memo is to evaluate my listening skills, assess my strengths and weaknesses, and describe how I can improve my skills. My listening self-assessment score of 36 indicates that, although my skill level is decent, I have room to improve significantly. I regularly attend professional meetings where either informational listening or critical listening is required. Despite this, I consider my listening skills subpar and am aware of my need for improvement. In understanding how I can improve, I must first assess my strengths and weaknesses.

Memory is the process involved in retaining, retrieving and using information about stimuli, images, events, ideas and skills after the original information is no longer present. We can relate this case with what we learn in psychology. Short term memory holds information from 15 until 30 seconds whereas long term memory holds information for years. Short-term memory (STM) is the system that is involved in storing small amount of information for a brief period of time while long-term memory (LTM) is the system that is responsible for storing information for long periods of time and recall information about past events in lives and knowledge learned.