Further notes on listening; talk topics on listening

Further Notes on Listening

Listening ultimately is a matter of concentration and conscious activity.
Impediments to listening include distractions, sensory or mental; physical impairments such as inebriateion, lack of good blood flow, lack of oxygen.
Assessing what distracts and what is tolerable is itself an excellent exercise. Techniques for listening: concentration. Remove distractions, limit musical choices, background noise, etc. inasmuch as one can and as one finds them distracting.
Work on developing means to improve concentration and focus as well as blood flow and slow release of sugars to the brain.
Breakfast is tremendously important to learning; a breakfast of complex carbohydrates is better than one of sugar-caffeine-starch (e.g. coffee, Red Bull, and a Twinkie is not a good breakfast for listening and thinking).

Topics Relating to Listening:

Listening as distinct from hearing

Listening as a conscious activity may be linked to memory but probably not as strongly as smell

One must cultivate ways to listen; one must know what to listen for

practice listening; listening practice

Listening with judgment and listening without judgment; prejudice limits listening

How to combine listening and reading
How to combine listening and writing
dictation
note-taking

How to tell a general point from a specific
examples and illustrations
tangents and meanders

Where speakers often fail their listeners
the importance of the pause
speaking speed and listening speed
ask for time to take notes
instructors/speakers:
stop, summarize, have students/listeners recap and then take notes

If instructors’ notes are clear and comprehensive, students’s should be also

Listening grading into speech
avoid straw person fallacy: always state or restate the opposing or alternate position

Listening

Here are the results of the Foundations of Verbal Communications staff examination of "listening" at our meeting 25 May 2006:

David Spolum on Listening:

To listen is to: visualize in one’s mind’s eye what is being spoken – if it is realistic or factual in nature then to link it to reality (even perhaps one’s personal experience) – if fantastic or abstract ion nature then to use one’s imagination (or attempt to) to envision what is being spoken.

Linda King Brown on Listening:

What is listening?

* being alert, aware, engaged, and present
* absorbing the facts, perspectives, opinions, descriptions of another person or persons speaking – of a text
– of a song
– of a piece of art

* processing but not immediately analyzing or drawing conclusions
* requires open state of mind; removal of "self"
* allowing communication to flow unhindered

Why is listening important to a college student?

* will constantly be exposed to new material and experiences in all of their classes
* must understand one’s own historical and cultural "context" so that any prejudices or preconceived notions of a subject can be identified

How can listening be improved?

* by removing distractions – physical and emotional
* refrain from judgment initially
* intentionally focus
* don’t let note-taking interfere

What are some tools, techniques, exercises one may practice to strengthen listening?

* in-class written responses
* waiting to speak, speak thoughtfully
* repeating, echoing another’s point of view for clarification
* asking questions


Mark Edward Achtermann on listening:

What is listening?

Listening is hearing made conscious. Listening is active.

Listening necessarily involves a degree of judgment, discernment, and categorization, but listening itself is neither categorizing, nor discerning, nor judging.

Listening is impaired by a false view of listening, by pre-judgment of what is heard, by external or internal distractions.

Why is listening important to a college student?

Many instructions are given only orally, or in written form but with oral additions. One must be able to follow oral directions, therefore one must be able to listen.

Most interactions with other students, academically and socially, will be oral; to get the most out of these interactions, and to avoid wrong understandings, one must be able to listen.

Much information provided in a college course is provided in the way of spoken presentations, whether discussions, formal or informal talks, or lectures. To be able to efficiently take in the information given, one must be able to listen.

Furthermore, listening allows one to experience the world more fully; the more conscious one is of the act of listening, the more one can direct and enlarge the experience of the world.

How can listening be improved?

To begin with, it is most useful to recognize that one cannot do more than one thing at once. We often deceive ourselves with the idea that we can do two or more things at once, but this is not correct – we may do them in so rapid a sequence as to seem to be doing more than one thing, but in fact only one thing is happening at a time. We may listen, or take notes, or doodle, or think about something unrelated to what we are hearing, but we cannot do all of these, or even three of these, or even two of these, at once. Thus, to listen, one must listen.

To listen, one must first be silent.

One can work on eliminating the impairments of listening. By cultivating a proper view of listening, one can overcome false views of listening. The chief false view of listening is that it is identical to hearing, and that it is passive. Listening is an activity. By becoming aware of one’s prejudices related to what one is hearing, one can set them to the side and listen without them. By reducing or eliminating distractions, external and internal, one can be more purely in contact with what one is hearing.

Correct posture for listening involves an upright spine and regular, even, deep (but not forced) breathing, the entire body still.

What are some tools one can use to improve listening?

Tools useful to listening are fundamentally hearing devices; listening is a mainly a matter of technique, not of tools.

In some cases, some amplification is required or helpful. Cupping a hand around the ear is in fact useful. Opening the mouth very slightly is also helpful. In more extreme cases, electronic amplification may be useful.

A tape recorder or similar recording device may be a useful tool in learning how to listen. If one has difficulty concentrating while listening, and finds that one’s mind drifts, one may be able to work on extending the time one may stay alert by listening to recordings; to say more is to delve into technique, however.

What are some techniques or exercises one can use to improve one’s listening?

Listening carefully to music is a good beginning. One might also listen to a recording of something other than music. The goal is to listen without imposing mental images or allowing the mind to drift from the music itself (or from the other material). By listening to the same material several times with the precise purpose of increasing the length of time during which one can concentrate solely on the music (or other material), eventually one will gain the ability to listen without prejudice or other internal distraction. Because we must often face many external distractions, using a recording which can be played back is helpful, as one can stop the exercise when one is distracted, and begin again, and so begin to determine the increase in concentration.

Listening carefully to another person’s argument and rephrasing the argument so that the meaning remains in the order given is also a good beginning. Note, however, that the rephrasing of the argument is a demonstration of the listening, rather than the listening itself.

An intermediate-level technique involves identifying or locating the sources of sounds, for example, learning to distinguish an oboe from a clarinet in a symphonic composition, or learning to distinguish the call of a robin from that of a sparrow. Learning to distinguish the patterns of human languages, whether one understands the words or not, is also a useful intermediate-level technique.

The Primary Work: Listening: Clarity

We must first determine goals for teaching foundations of verbal communication.

As I see it, all verbal communication is encompassed in four areas: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. I will assume here as a rule students who have all the average human senses and intellectual potential, rather than striving to point out the many possible exceptions and constructing special goals for them.

In the area of listening, anyone who has taught liberal arts even briefly knows that a great deal of information is conveyed through speech, and the student is expected to listen. So, even if our goal is only to prepare students for the remainder of their college career, listening is a skill we must specially cultivate. However, listening is a skill with many other applications than college study.

Listening requires a degree of clarity and focus.

Listening is not the same as hearing. Hearing is unconscious and occurs continuously. Listening is conscious, begins when a perceived sound is outside of a range of safety, and lasts only so long as the sounds perceived have not been characterized sufficiently to be sublimated.

In a world in which we are surrounded by sound, often by sound which could be meaningful, and furthermore by sound which, in a less artificial environment, would signify danger, consciousness of sound is rare.

Consciousness is driven by the will. If one does not wish to listen, one will not. The teacher, therefore, who wishes to communicate through sound, must find some way to command attention. However, once attention has been gained, the teacher must make clear that eventually the listener must self-direct.

One of the goals of the foundation of verbal communication courses therefore must be to provide students with techniques and tools whereby they may become conscious of sound.

One line of work has to do with emptying the mind of clutter, so that sound can enter.

Think of how often you have entered a classroom with thoughts other than those of the material you are to teach. Students are in the same position, although traditional college age students may be in a worse position, because of the neurology of adolescence. Assuming that you, the teacher, are physically an adult and your hormonal systems are relatively balanced, you are not in the same position as an eighteen-year-old. Thanks to past circumstances beyond our reach, we have a wide range of students, not all of whom are particularly verbally oriented, many of whom are ill-prepared for college, and many of whom, further, are not particularly interested in what we have to teach. Combine this with, in our circumstance, classes "early" in the morning, or in the afternoon after a full day of studio work, and the likelihood that a students has had far less than the recommended nine- to eleven-hours of sleep, has probably taken little or no time to prepare, and may have had a poor breakfast, and you should be amazed that any learning takes place at all.

It's not that students have no thoughts -- it's that they are too weak to resist the flow of thoughts.

What students need -- though they generally resist the idea for some reason (and we should explore this) -- is training in some meditation form or other which will provide a focused mind. I personally think this requires bodily relaxation and recognition of, but setting aside of, errant thought.

Posture, therefore, is a priority issue.

This sounds archaic, I know, or New Agey. I'll readily admit the eccentricity of suggesting that on the first day of college, the instructors should insist before anything else upon good posture.

I insist that we should so insist. All else follows from this.

We might also begin, as an "icebreaker", with "what did you have for breakfast?" Perhaps the wealthier among us might go so far as to bring something like granola bars in for those students whose breakfasts have been unacceptable. I cannot emphasize enough how basic health, hygiene, and nutrition will determine effectiveness of learning. Call me a nut.

One cannot listen until one has internal silence. This means a silence of unrelated thoughts, but also of related ones. If I am listening to a speaker and begin ruminating upon one of her points, I miss the others, because I am still back with that one point.

We must remember as speakers that 1) we must provide silence in which what we have spoken can be processed and 2) inexperienced listeners require guidance in interpreting nuance.

On the first point, this means:
Do not speak constantly (a lesson I have never learned well). Pause periodically. I often write main points on the board as full sentences, and while I write I try not to speak. This provides processing time. Have you ever attended a Power Point presentation and felt terribly rushed? Good. That is what your students experience everyday. Power Point sucks because everything is "there" already, usually too much, and the presenter tends to rush through it so fast that you can't take it in. So what if you have a print out of the whole thing. Are you really going to review it? Be honest. So, what have we learned?
Provide plenty of 'wait time' when asking questions. Two minutes is not excessive -- rarely will students take that long before someone "cracks" and answers. Use a watch, if you must.

On the second point, this means:
Most contemporary college students have no sense of the distinction between "irony" and "sarcasm". Never employ sarcasm, as much as you may be tempted to do so. Irony is a hallowed pedagogical tool, but note the Oxford primary definition: "ignorance deliberately feigned". Be certain that you are yourself clear on the distinction between irony and sarcasm. Feigned ignorance can draw a student out, but not if you give yourself the appearance of the Omniscient One. Socrates succeeded in using irony as a tool because he did so frequently and never made great claims for what he did, in the end, seem to know.
Most contemporary college students seem to have difficulty distinguishing between "example" and "ramble". We may rail at this as a deplorable circumstance -- and it assuredly is deplorable -- but we are where we are, and absent a vessel to transport us to the (probably non-existent) world in which example and ramble were or are or will be clearly distinguishable to students, we must take the situation as it is. We can either abandon illustrative tangents, or find a way to make it clear that we are, in fact, now going on a bit of a verbal excursion, giving examples and relating them immediately back to the point illustrated. Subtlety can be cultivated, but don't expect much of it in the average foundation-year student.

Remember: we have four years to accomplish the result. Don't rush. Slow and steady wins the race.

The Purpose of this Blog

In a general sense, this blog is established for the use of the Department of Liberal Arts of the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design in a loose and unofficial capacity. Presentations made here in my name (ME Achtermann), reflect my own views, which are generally in accord with the official position of the College, but should not be construed as being universally so in accord. This is not an official organ of the College. Reader, are you getting this? If you want the official website of the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, go to www.pcad.edu. You will find that the faculty of the Department of Liberal Arts are not represented there. We are busy teaching, and writing blogs about teaching.

In a more specific and immediate sense, this blog is designed as a forum for the Foundations of Verbal Communications Group at the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It provides an opportunity for faculty to present their views on the nature of verbal communications and for others to add -- civilly, constructively, and specifically -- comment and suggestion.

Hopefully here we will be able to thrash out the syllabi and other materials for the courses "Foundations of Verbal Communication 001: Developmental Writing Workshop" and "Foundations of Verbal Communication 101 and 102: Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing". Instructors please note: do not post final-form examinations here unless you wish students to be able to view them prior to their administration!