Chapter -3: ~~~ Listening ~~~

What is listening? ? and   What is hearing? ?                                                                            

When I heard those question, I was a little bit confused. I asked myself what is hearing again and again. It took me a bit longer. And the lecturer gave us answer.
Hearing is just receiving sound. For hearing, we don't need to pay attention or focus. Our ears just receive the vibration.
However, listening is the specialized process, a type of perception, by which we receive auditory signals. Moreover, Emmert (1994)  said " listening is the process of receiving, constructing meaning from and responding to spoken and/or non-verbal messages".  It can assist us to learn, play, influence and help.

Before I started learning this chapter, I just thought listening is just we listen what the others say. Actually listening has it's own stages. "There are 5 stages in the listening process."  That sentence took my attention. As I'm also one of the human living, I do listening in my daily life. I listened to my parents, lecturers, friends and so on. But, I didn't notice it's stages. So,  one question popped up in my mind. "What are the stages of listening process?"



The 5 stages of listening are:

• Receiving-- is hearing and attending to the verbal and non-verbal messages.
  This receiving stage can be more effective if we focus on the speaker what is he/she talking about rather than what we will talk after next. However, we should think how to respond after his/her conversation. The most important things is to maintain our role as listener. We, as listener, we shouldn't interpret while speaker isn't finished its speech. 
• Understanding -- is decoding the speaker's messages or we learn what the speaker means. If we want more positive effects from this stage, we should relate the information, which is given by the speakers, to the one we already knew in our past. And also we should look though the speaker's point of view. His/her point may not be same with us. But we shouldn't judge without fully understanding what is his/her point. We can ask questions after the speech. By asking questions to the speaker is one of the ways to checking our understanding and checking our point of view that is the same as the speaker or not. And then,  we should rewrite or think again what the speaker said in our own words. 
• Remembering -- is retaining messages received and understood for at least some period of time. The effective ways for this step is that we should identify the speaker's main idea and supporting evidence. Actually we had the activity in the class when we learnt this stage. Our lecturer gave us 20 words in the slide and we were given two minutes to remember those words.

            So, I summarized those words and made a story. And then I repeated two, three times in my mind.               By the time the lecturer asked to write, I could write all 20 words. But, I didn't notice that                             summarizing messages and repeating is helpful and effective to remember. I only realized when our                 lecturer mentioned.

• Evaluating -- consists of judging messages we hear in some way. This stage can be made more effective if we resist evaluation until we understand the point that speaker mentioned, think that the speaker is a person of goodwill, determine the opinions and personal interpretations by the speaker and identify any prejudices that may lead to the speaker to slant unfairly what is presented. 
• Responding -- happens in two situations. The first thing is we respond to the speaker while he/she is speaking and another one is responding after the speech is finished. For more effective way, firstly we should support the speaker by using back-channeling cues, in our final responses such as suggestion or opinion and state our thoughts and feelings on our own words by using "I" messages. 

Listening is quite difficult because of unavoidable difference between speaker and listener and also because of their experiences.

Under the subtopic of Listening & Culture, we have diversity of listening and culture.

There are 4 ways to be effective in Listening.

1. Participatory and passive listening---means we have to participate mentally  and physically in listening and passive listening is not without merit. 
2. Emphatic and Objective listening --- here means, to listen with empathy (thinking empathy & feeling empathy) and listen more objectively.
3. Non-judgemental and critical listening --- it's to listen with an open mind and with a view toward understanding and with a view toward making some kind of evaluation of judgement. 
4. Surface & Depth listening --- to listen from the literal and also depth.