Like the communication process, listening has cognitive, behavioral, and relational elements
and doesn’t unfold in a linear, step-by-step fashion.
keep in mind that they do not capture the speed, overlapping nature, or overall complexity of the
actual process in action.
The stages of the listening process are receiving, interpreting, recalling, evaluating, and
responding
Recall that salience is the degree to which something attracts our attention in a particular
context and that we tend to find salient things that are visually or audibly stimulating and things
that meet our needs or interests.
Think about how it’s much easier to listen to a lecture on a subject that you find very interesting.
When we understand something, we are able to attach meaning by connecting information to
previous experiences.
****If we have difficulty interpreting information, meaning we don’t have previous experience or
information in our existing schemata to make sense of it, then it is difficult to transfer the
information into our long-term memory for later recall.
****. I remember earning perfect scores on exams in my anatomy class in college because I was
able to memorize and recall, for example, all the organs in the digestive system. In fact, I might
still be able to do that now over a decade later. But neither then nor now could I tell you the
significance or function of most of those organs, meaning I didn’t really get to a level of
understanding but simply stored the information for later recall.
We forget about half of what we hear immediately after hearing it, recall 35 percent after eight
hours, and recall 20 percent after a day (Hargie, 2011).
Our memory consists of multiple “storage units,” including sensory storage, short-term memory,
working memory, and long-term memory (Hargie, 2011).
One danger within the evaluation stage of listening is to focus your evaluative lenses more on
the speaker than the message. This can quickly become a barrier to effective listening if we
begin to prejudge a speaker based on his or her identity or characteristics rather than on the
content of his or her message
Make sure to paraphrase and/or ask questions once a person’s turn is over, because
interrupting can also be interpreted as a sign of not listening.
The main purposes of listening are (Hargie, 2011)
• to focus on messages sent by other people or noises coming from our
surroundings;
• to better our understanding of other people’s communication;
• to critically evaluate other people’s messages;
• to monitor nonverbal signals;
• to indicate that we are interested or paying attention;
• to empathize with others and show we care for them (relational maintenance);
and
• to engage in negotiation, dialogue, or other exchanges that result in shared
understanding of or agreement on an issue.
