Public Speaking

This ChapTer Will

help You

• Distinguish listening
from hearing

• Appreciate the impor-
tance of listening skills

• Describe linguistic,
cultural, and personal
barriers that affect your
listening

• Draw and explain four
thought patterns that
are common during
listening

• Identify strategies to
improve your compre-
hensive listening

• Understand some
diverse cultural
listening styles

• Improve your critical
listening skills

• Give effective nonver-
bal feedback

• Give appropriate verbal
and written feedback
using the D-R-E
method

ChaPter

4

AN ANCIENT PROVERB emphasizes the comparative importance of listening:

“We have been given two ears and but a single mouth in order that we may hear

more and talk less.”^1 Unfortunately, we often focus less on developing our listen-

ing competencies than on improving our reading, writing, and speaking skills.

Listening is more than simply hearing. I can hear traffic outside, a door

slamming down the hall, rain against the window—that is, my ears pick up those

sounds, but I’m not listening to them. Listening is an active mental process in which

you interpret messages to understand and respond to them.^2 It takes motivation,

effort, and concentration. Listening has at least five elements: (1) receiving

sounds, (2) discriminating or distinguishing among them, (3) focusing attention,

(4) assigning meaning to the sounds, and then (5) remembering the information.

In contrast, something that goes in one ear and out the other is hearing.

Review the

chapter

Learning

Objectives

and Start

with a quick

warm-up

activity.

listening active process

that receives, distinguishes,

attends to, assigns meaning,

and remembers what you

hear

hearing physical process

involving sound waves,

eardrums, and brain

receptors

effective listening

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