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4.5: Stages of Listening

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    14629
    • Anonymous
    • LibreTexts
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    Learning Objectives
    • Explain the receiving stage of listening.
    • Explain the understanding stage of listening.
    • Explain the remembering stage of listening.
    • Explain the evaluating stage of listening.
    • Explain the responding stage of listening.
    • Understand the two types of feedback listeners give to speakers.

    As you read earlier, there are many factors that can interfere with listening, so you need to be able to manage a number of mental tasks at the same time in order to be a successful listener. Author Joseph DeVito (2000) has divided the listening process into five stages: receiving, understanding, remembering, evaluating, and responding.

    4.4.0.jpg
    Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Stages of Feedback

    Receiving

    Receiving is the intentional focus on hearing a speaker’s message, which happens when we filter out other sources so that we can isolate the message and avoid the confusing mixture of incoming stimuli. At this stage, we are still only hearing the message. Notice in Figure 4.3 “Stages of Feedback” that this stage is represented by the ear because it is the primary tool involved with this stage of the listening process.

    One of the authors of this book recalls attending a political rally for a presidential candidate at which about five thousand people were crowded into an outdoor amphitheater. When the candidate finally started speaking, the cheering and yelling was so loud that the candidate couldn’t be heard easily despite using a speaker system. In this example, our coauthor had difficulty receiving the message because of the external noise. This is only one example of the ways that hearing alone can require sincere effort, but we must hear the message before we can continue the process of listening.

    Understanding

    In the understanding stage, we attempt to learn the meaning of the message, which is not always easy. For one thing, if a speaker does not enunciate clearly, it may be difficult to tell what the message was—did your friend say, “I think she’ll be late for class,” or “my teacher delayed the class”? Notice in Figure 4.3 “Stages of Feedback” that stages two, three, and four are represented by the brain because it is the primary tool involved with these stages of the listening process.

    Even when we have understood the words in a message, because of the differences in our backgrounds and experience, we sometimes make the mistake of attaching our own meanings to the words of others. For example, say you have made plans with your friends to meet at a certain movie theater, but you arrive and nobody else shows up. Eventually you find out that your friends are at a different theater all the way across town where the same movie is playing. Everyone else understood that the meeting place was the “west side” location, but you wrongly understood it as the “east side” location and therefore missed out on part of the fun.

    The consequences of ineffective listening in a classroom can be much worse. When the professor advises students to get an “early start” on your speech, he, she, or they probably hopes students will begin research right away and move on to developing a thesis statement and outlining the speech as soon as possible. However, students might misunderstand the instructor’s meaning in several ways. One student might interpret the advice to mean that as long as she gets started, the rest of the assignment will have time to develop itself. Another student might instead think that to start early is to start on the Friday before the Monday due date instead of Sunday night.

    So much of the way we understand others is influenced by our own perceptions and experiences. Therefore, at the understanding stage of listening, we should be on the lookout for places where our perceptions might differ from those of the speaker.

    Remembering

    Remembering begins with listening; if we can’t remember something that was said, we might not have been listening effectively. Wolvin and Coakley (1996) note that the most common reason for not remembering a message after the fact is because it wasn’t really learned in the first place. However, even when we are listening attentively, some messages are more difficult than others to understand and remember. Highly complex messages that are filled with detail call for highly developed listening skills. Moreover, if something distracts our attention even for a moment, we could miss out on information that explains other new concepts we hear when we begin to listen fully again.

    It’s also important to know that we can improve our memory of a message by processing it meaningfully—that is, by applying it in ways that are meaningful to our own lives (Gluck, et al., 2008). Instead of simply repeating a new acquaintance’s name over and over, for example, we might remember it by associating it with something in our own lives. For example, “Emily,” we might say, “reminds me of the Emily we knew in middle school,” or “Mr. Impiari’s name reminds us of the Prius our friend drives.”

    Finally, if understanding has been inaccurate, recollection of the message will be inaccurate too.

    Evaluating

    The fourth stage in the listening process is evaluating, or judging the value of the message. We might be thinking, “This makes sense” or, conversely, “This is very odd.” Because everyone embodies biases and perspectives learned from widely diverse sets of life experiences, evaluations of the same message can vary widely from one listener to another. Even the most open-minded listeners will have opinions of a speaker, and those opinions will influence how the message is evaluated. People are more likely to evaluate a message positively if the speaker speaks clearly, presents ideas logically, and gives reasons to support the points made.

    Unfortunately, personal opinions sometimes result in prejudiced evaluations. Imagine listening to a speech given by someone from another country and this person has an accent that is hard to understand. We may have a hard time simply making out the speaker’s message. Some people find a foreign accent to be interesting or even exotic, while others find it annoying or even take it as a sign of ignorance. If a listener has a strong bias against foreign accents, the listener may not even attempt to attend to the message. If we mistrust a speaker because of an accent, we could be rejecting important or personally enriching information. Good listeners have learned to refrain from making these judgments and instead to focus on the speaker’s meanings.

    Responding

    Responding—sometimes referred to as feedback—is the fifth and final stage of the listening process. It’s the stage at which we indicate our involvement. Almost anything we do at this stage can be interpreted as feedback. For example, students are giving positive feedback to their instructors if at the end of class they stay behind to finish a sentence in their notes or approach the instructor to ask for clarification. The opposite kind of feedback is given by students who gather their belongings and rush out the door as soon as class is over. Notice in Figure 4.3 “Stages of Feedback” that this stage is represented by the lips because we often give feedback in the form of verbal feedback; however, we can just as easily respond nonverbally.

    Formative Feedback

    Not all response occurs at the end of the message. Formative feedback is a natural part of the ongoing transaction between a speaker and a listener. As the speaker delivers the message, a listener signals his or her involvement with focused attention, note-taking, nodding, and other behaviors that indicate understanding or failure to understand the message. These signals are important to the speaker, who is interested in whether the message is clear and accepted or whether the content of the message is meeting the resistance of preconceived ideas. Speakers can use this feedback to decide whether additional examples, support materials, or explanation is needed.

    Summative Feedback

    Summative feedback is given at the end of the communication. When we attend a political rally, a presentation given by a speaker we admire, or even a class, there are verbal and nonverbal ways of indicating our appreciation for or our disagreement with the messages or the speakers at the end of the message. Maybe we stand up and applaud a speaker we agreed with or just sit staring in silence after listening to a speaker we didn’t like. In other cases, a speaker may be attempting to persuade us to donate to a charity, so if the speaker passes a bucket and we make a donation, we are providing feedback on the speaker’s effectiveness. At the same time, we do not always listen most carefully to the messages of speakers we admire. Sometimes we simply enjoy being in their presence, and our summative feedback is not about the message but about our attitudes about the speaker. If our feedback is limited to something like, “I just love your voice,” we might be indicating that we did not listen carefully to the content of the message.

    There is little doubt that by now, listening is complex and there is great potential for errors. By becoming aware of what is involved with active listening and where difficulties might lie, we can prepare ourselves both as listeners and as speakers to minimize listening errors with our own public speeches.

    Key Takeaways

    • The receiving stage of listening is the basic stage where an individual hears a message being sent by a speaker.
    • The understanding stage of listening occurs when a receiver of a message attempts to figure out the meaning of the message.
    • The remembering stage of listening is when a listener either places information into long-term memory or forgets the information presented.
    • The evaluating stage of listening occurs when a listener judges the content of the message or the character of the speaker.
    • The responding stage of listening occurs when a listener provides verbal or nonverbal feedback about the speaker or message.
    • During the responding stage of listening, listeners can provide speakers with two types of feedback designed to help a speaker know whether a listener is understanding and what the listener thinks of a message. Formative feedback is given while the speaker is engaged in the act of speech making. Summative feedback is given at the conclusion of a speech.

    Exercises

    1. Make a list of some of the abstract words you have misunderstood. What were the consequences of the misunderstanding?
    2. Reflect on your listening in class or in other settings where remembering information is important. What keeps you from remembering important information accurately?
    3. Give an example of a time when you felt that your message was misunderstood or treated with shallow attention. How did you know your message had been misunderstood or rejected? What does this mean you must do as a student of public speaking?

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