PISMP TESL JUNE 2017 INTAKE

ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES

TSLB3023

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 ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES
TSLB3023

TOPIC:
Listening Skills
• Listening to lectures/ seminars/ presentations :
- comprehensive/ active listening
- informative listening
- discriminative listening
- critical/analytical listening

COURSE LEARNING OUTCOME:

To demonstrate competency in listening to discussions,
lectures and seminars.

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THE POWER OF LISTENING

What is Listening?

• Active process of receiving, constructing meaning from, and

responding to spoken and/or nonverbal messages; to hear
something with thoughtful attention. (ILA 1996)

• Attributing meaning to sound (i.e., listening) is the more

important and significant goal than simply hearing or
perceiving sounds.

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Listening and Hearing
• Hearing: physical process that is natural & passive

• Listening:
- an active process
- physical & mental process
- learned process
- involves the ability to retain information
- involves the ability to react empathically and/or
appreciatively
- involves construction, retention, and reaction to
meanings we assign to information
• Listening is hard!
You must choose to participate in the process of listening.
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 What is Listening to Learn?

Learning is defined as the permanent change in behavior that

results from experience. But this learned information must be
stored within us in order to be retrieved later. This process of
storage is memory: the mechanism that allows us to retain and
retrieve information over time.

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Describe a scenario of going to eat ice cream.

Then, recall specific instances of your childhood.

As you remember certain events, discuss how this exercise illustrates

how stimulus cues can trigger long term recall.

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 Barriers to Listening
Physical Focusing on delivery and personal appearance
distractions Speaker’s delivery
External distractions
Mental Egocentrism Equate with hearing
distractions Defensiveness Not concentrating
Experiential Superiority Culture differences
Personal Bias Mentally preparing response
Pseudo Listening Personal bias
Jumping to conclusions
Personal concerns
Listening too hard
Faking attention

Factual Listening for facts So what conclusion

distractions Uninteresting topics can you make with
regards to barriers
Semantic Language differences
to listening???
distractions
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1. Comprehensive/Active Listening Skills
 Active listening is “involved listening with a purpose” (Barker, 1971).

 Is fundamental to all listening sub-types.

 Involves understanding the message or messages that are being

communicated. The ultimate goal of comprehensive listening is to
understand the message the speaker is communicating.

 The listener must actually listen and not assume what is said

 To fully comprehend what is being said requires you to hear the words,
understand the use of tone & body language.

• Valued in conversation, small-group discussion, and even question-and-

answer sessions in public speaking.

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  Steps in Active Listening:

(1) Listen Carefully

(2) Reflect & Paraphrase

(3) Question

(4) Provide Feedback.

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PROBLEMS

• Non-verbal signals can also confuse and potentially lead to

misunderstanding.

• Overly complicated language or technical jargon can be a barrier to

comprehensive listening. To gain understanding, the listener needs
appropriate vocabulary and language skills.

• Two different people listening to the same thing may understand the
message in two different ways. This problem can be multiplied in a
group setting (classroom or meeting) where numerous different
meanings can be derived from what has been said.

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 2. Informative Listening Skills

Informative listening focuses on the ability of an

individual to understand a speaker's message
where the listener's primary concern is to
understand the message. Listeners are successful if
the meaning they assign to messages is as close as
possible to that which the sender intended.

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•Although all types of listening are
‘active’ – they require concentration
and a conscious effort to understand.
Informational listening is less active
than many of the other types of
listening. When we’re listening to
learn or be instructed we are taking in
new information and facts, we are not
criticising or analysing.
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 Important steps in Informative Listening: To be a competent
informational listener:

Memory
To understand what is said in the present, one must remember what has been
said. For the message to have impact, one must remember at least parts of it at
some point in the future.

Identification
Identify the main point that the speaker is trying to bring across. When the
main point has been deduced, one can begin to sort out the rest of the
information and decide where it belongs in the mental outline (chunking).
Before getting the big picture of a message, it can be difficult to focus on what
the speaker is saying, because it is impossible to know where any particular
piece of information fits.

Questions
It is usually helpful to ask oneself questions about the speaker's message. If the
listener is mentally asking questions about what is being said, it is a good sign
that he/she is actively involved in effective informational listening.
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 3. Discriminative Listening Skills
Discriminative listening does not involve the understanding of the meaning of
words or phrases but merely the different sounds that are produced. It is the
most basic type of listening, whereby the difference between sounds is
identified. If you cannot hear differences, then you cannot make sense of the
meaning that is expressed by such differences.

Being able to distinguish the subtleties of sound made by somebody who is

happy or sad, angry or stressed, for example, ultimately adds value to what is
actually being said and, of course, does aid comprehension. When
discriminative listening skills are combined with visual stimuli, the resulting
ability to ‘listen’ to body-language enables us to begin to understand the
speaker more fully – for example recognising somebody is sad despite what
they are saying or how they are saying it.

Listening is a visual as well as auditory act, as we communicate much through

body language. We thus also need to be able to discriminate between muscle
and skeletal movements that signify different meanings.

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EXAMPLE:
Imagine yourself surrounded by people who are speaking a language that you
cannot understand. Perhaps passing through an airport in another
country. You can probably distinguish between different voices, male and
female, young and old and also gain some understanding about what is going
on around you based on the tone of voice, mannerisms and body language of
the other people. You are not understanding what is being said but using
discriminative listening to gain some level of comprehension of your
surroundings.

We learn to discriminate between sounds within our own language early, and
often are unable to discriminate the sounds of other languages. This is one
reason why a person from one country finds it difficult to speak another
language perfectly, as they are unable to distinguish the subtle sounds that are
required in that language.

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 4. Critical / Analytical Listening Skills
Involves analysis, critical thinking and judgment making.

Occurs when you still want to understand what the other person is saying, but
also have some reason or responsibility to evaluate what is being said to you and
how it is being said.

Try to understand the other person FIRST, before one evaluates.

Critical listening and critical thinking go hand in hand: You cannot listen critically
if you do not think critically. Skills in critical listening are especially important
because we are constantly bombarded with persuasive messages (social media,
scholarly articles, commercials, etc).

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 Tutorial Task
Work in groups of 3.

Find definitions of the following listening skills:

 comprehensive/active listening,
 informative listening,
 discriminative listening,
 critical/analytical listening.

Find examples of situations that demand the types of listening skills

above.

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