ACTIVE LISTENING

Barriers to effective listening:

• daydreaming
• mentally arguing with the speaker
• desire to talk
• lack of interest

Brammer and MacDonald suggest that skills which promote understand of self and others tend to fall into seven clusters.   Here are 5 of the 7 clusters.

      

  1. Listening Skills:  These skills help us to listen with our third ear.  We listen with all of our capacities in order to answer the question:  What is going on in this person and in her/his life space right now?

2. Attending:  eye contact, being sensitive to cultural variations; posture --relaxed, slight forward lean;  gestures -- natural, not stiff or exaggerated; verbal -- minimal encouragers.

3. Paraphrasing:  restating the client's message in different words. This strategy communicates to the client that we are trying to understand and allows us to test our our understanding of what the client said.

4. Clarifying:  Asking for clarification, rather than providing it. Here we admit to some confusion about the client's message and ask for help in understanding them. We can do it after finished with the recorded material.

5. Perception check:  Asking the client/teacher to verify our perception of what s/he said.  To check our perception, we can paraphrase what we heard, ask for confirmation that we heard correctly, and then allow the client to correct our perception if it was inaccurate.Or we can ask the teacher to repeat.

Can active listening help me communicate better, improve productivity and save time? You bet it can, and even more.
We communicate all the time, all day long, everywhere we go, and we miscommunicate also. But how often do we think about the communication process and how effective we are at communicating and if it might be a good idea to become better communicators.
When was the last time you spent some effort to improve your communication skills?

There are so many benefits to improving your listening skills and the downside of miscommunication is so great I’m sure you’ll agree it is worth some effort, these are the examples:

• when it's your turn to listen - Stop Talking
• identify with the speaker
• ask questions
• concentrate
• avoid jumping to conclusions
• listen for the main points
• take notes

Listening is probably one of the most difficult skills to develop when learning any foreign language.  Some things to remember to do when working on your listening are as follows:
Relax
When you are stressed, any language learning skill can be made more difficult.  If you take some time to relax, maybe even do some meditation or deep breathing exercises before you begin, you might find that listening exercises become easier.
Enjoy
If you are going to practice your listening, why not choose something you enjoy.  Music has been a great media for people to improve their English.  When you choose material that you enjoy, you are able to capture more in your listening exercises.  It is likely that when you listen to something you like, you already know some or most of the vocabulary.  In regards to music, listen carefully to how each word is pronounced and repeat along with the singer (if you have the lyric sheet).  In addition to music, audio books can be a great source of listening practice.  Make sure you have Window´s media player or some other type of media player installed.  If the speed of the speaker is too fast at first, some players have a speed option where you can slow down the velocity of the recording without changing the pitch of the speaker.
Write it down
If you are listening to a song or an audio book, have a pencil or pen and a piece of paper and spend some time writing words you understand from the listening.  Use context to figure out the words you don’t know.  This skill can be useful in real life settings when listening to people speak.  Concentrate on what you do understand. It is ok if you don’t understand everything.
Don’t translate
When you encounter words that you don’t know, do not translate them.  If your mind is busy translating an unknown word, you will miss vital contextual information and you won’t hear what the speaker is saying.
Conclusion
Relax, Enjoy, Write it down and Don´t translate.  Using these tips will gradually build your capacity to listen with more effectiveness.  If you have a suggestion or comment to add to this post, make sure you do so by clicking on the comment button.  Thank you for reading.

Listening can also lead to improved reading abilities in children. Audiobooks can help children in learning to listen and concentrate on verbal messages.
According to the educational website Reading Rockets, audiobooks can be used to:

• Introduce students to books above their reading level
• Model good interpretive reading
• Teach critical listening
• Highlight the humor in books
• Introduce new genres that students might not otherwise consider
• Introduce new vocabulary or difficult proper names or locales
• Sidestep unfamiliar dialects or accents, Old English, and old-fashioned literary styles
• Provide a read-aloud model
• Provide a bridge to important topics of discussion for parents and children who can listen together while commuting to sporting events, music lessons, or on vacations
• Recapture “the essence and the delights of hearing stories beautifully told by extraordinarily talented storytellers” (Baskin & Harris, 1995, p. 376)

from Benefits of Audiobooks for All Readers, by Denise Johnson at Reading Rockets.
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