6: Listening
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- 6.1: Introduction to Listening
- Listening may seem like a natural skill, but there is much more to this communicative act than it appears on the surface. To help you improve your own listening skills it requires that you have a better understanding of why listening is so important and what is involved in the listening process.
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- 6.2: Stages of the Listening Process
- Although listening may seem like it should be a fairly simple process, there are several steps to the listening process. Just as you learned in your chapter on perception, these steps occur so rapidly that we may not even realize we are doing them. The steps of the listening process that we will explore include receiving, interpreting, recalling, evaluating, and responding to messages.
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- 6.3: Functions of Listening
- We are sure that you have noticed that when you are watching a movie, or listening to music, that you are engaged differently than when you are listening to one of your professors. There is value in understanding that there are different functions of listening because we can then use the most appropriate listening skills to meet the purpose or occasion. Using these functions appropriately will lead to better engagement and understanding.
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- 6.5: Barriers to Listening
- A barrier to listening is anything that is hindering you from recognizing, understanding, and accurately interpreting the message that you are receiving. In this next section, we will discuss five different barriers to effective listening: Information overload, internal and external distractions, prejudice or prejudging, and rate of speech and thought.
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- 6.6: Ineffective Listening Practices
- Being aware or conscious of the habits we have is the first step to improving how we listen. This next section will look at ineffective listening practices that include pseudo-listening, selective listening, defensive listening, aggressive listening, narcissistic listening, insensitive listening, interrupting, and eavesdropping.
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- 6.7: Becoming a Better Listener
- The principles of active listening are not hard to understand, but they are hard to implement and require practice to use them effectively. Active listening is being engaged as a listener, not just hearing the words. Active listening requires purposefully focusing on what a speaker is saying with the objective of understanding. This final section of the chapter will describe what active listening means and the principles of active listening.
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