Listening skills also play a crucial role in personal and professional success and are especially important to master for students for whom the language of instruction is not their first language. Perfecting listening skills will foster learning in the classroom by helping students master the content of the course, ask incisive questions, and learn to think critically about the content of the course. In a dynamic classroom, both the instructor and the students need to be effective listeners. The listener can also demonstrate engagement by broadening the range of the conversation, such as by inquiring about or suggesting alternatives to the topic or conclusions at hand. The listener should communicate his or her attention through non-verbal means like eye contact, erect posture, nodding, and other positive body language. Receiving communications with empathy requires that the listener try to avoid projecting his or her own opinions, feelings or prejudices onto the speaker, and that the listener accept the speaker’s communications without simultaneously trying to craft a response.īehavioral characteristics of effective listeningĪction is also part of effective listening. The effective listener can also signal his or her affective engagement in the conversation by making it the sole focus of attention, and by receiving communications with acceptance and empathy. The characteristics of effective listening thus range across these cognitive, affective, and behavioral frames.Ĭognitive characteristics of effective listeningĪsking questions to follow up or for clarification, paraphrasing the individual communications, and summarizing the conversation are all activities that show the listener’s cognitive engagement in the conversation, indicating his or her attempts to fully understand and correctly interpret the messages being relayed.Īffective characteristics of effective listening In other words, to be an effective listener, the listener has to take into consideration what he or she is thinking about the communication being received, what he or she is feeling about the communication and also the context of the conversation, and what he or she will do in the process and as a result of the communication. Listening is an important communication competence that includes complex cognitive processes like understanding and interpreting messages, affective processes like being motivated to pay attention, and behavioral processes like responding with both verbal and nonverbal feedback. It is common for instructors to teach speaking, writing, and reading skills, and yet, listening is at once the least understood and most important of these competencies. By Elizabeth Fagan, Departments of History and Anthropology and Teaching Consultant at the Chicago Center for TeachingĬommunication takes place along four modalities: speaking, writing, listening, and reading.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |