Evaluation and Interpretation
Evaluation and Interpretation
We need to engage in careful listening in order to understand and evaluate the message. Once the listener has defined his or her listening goals and absorbed the information, he or she will probably proceed to make judgments and evaluations, sort information, find uses and applications, and discard or file the information for future reference (Prescott, Potter, and Franks, 1968). Contrary to many common expectations, listening is not a passive activity. We are constantly engaging in interpretation and meaning-making as we listen, and our listening engagement relies heavily on our environmental contexts and our listening goals. Researchers describe many different types of listening behaviors. Andrew Wolvin and Carolyn Coakley (1982, 9) identified five types of listening:
- Discriminative listening allows individuals to separate fact, which is provable information, from opinion, which is more subjective and ambiguous.
- Comprehensive listening is necessary for individuals to understand the message. This includes differentiating between vocal sounds in order to comprehend the emotional content of the message.
- Critical or evaluative listening is used to evaluate a message before accepting or rejecting it.
- Therapeutic listening allows the individual to listen without judging. The purpose of therapeutic listening is to help the speaker change or progress in some way.
- Appreciative listening allows individuals to listen for entertainment or enjoyment, such as when we listen to poetry or music.
Not all types of listening are equally effective. Active listening, also known as reflective listening, is the skill of listening closely and reflecting back the information to the speaker. In Developing the Fine Art of Listening, Hal Ritter Jr. and Patricia Wilson (2006) explain that when engaged in active listening, the listener mirrors or reflects the information by re-stating or paraphrasing what the speaker has said, followed by a question to check for the accuracy of what we thought we heard. Such listening behavior greatly reduces miscommunication and errors in perception by clarifying the message and creating common ground.
Listening scholars recognize meaningful differences in active listening behaviors. In his work, Carl Rogers (1962) writes eloquently of the need to abandon an egocentric perspective when listening, which better allows us to comprehend the opposing point of view. Such listening, in his view, challenges preconceived assumptions as individuals are to take in the world around them. As a result of a deeply engaged active listening, individuals gradually experience greater listening competency as well as growth towards valuable modes of understanding. Essential to this model is the notion of empathy, a feeling, perhaps intuitive, in which one individual identifies with another, in other words, “one feels with and for that person” (Hobart and Fahlberg, 1965, 596). Because Rogers finds that this type of listening activity increases our empathic understanding of others he named it emphatic listening. In Rogers’ view, individuals will stop listening if they become angry or defensive. An effective speaker has the power to coax its audience closer to a model of emphatic listening. If a speaker wants to be really effective, he or she must be more concerned with communicating and encouraging an open and active listening behavior than in egocentric behaviors such as lecturing the audience.
Relational or dialogic listening, also a type of active listening, takes into account the whole listening environment and seeks to enhance personal relationships. Relationships are built through conversations, and relational or dialogic listening seeks to learn about and from the other individual in the relationship in order to further enhance mutual understanding and communication. Other scholars extend the definition of relational listening to relational communication, where listening and speaking occur simultaneously in face-to-face human interaction (Eisenberg & Goodall, 1993, 107). The relational model of communication recommends that even if you believe you have learned all there is to know about another individual in a relationship with you, you should be open to modifying your assumptions and conclusions based on new information acquired in each communicative exchange (Bromwell, 2006, 182).
You may have noticed by now that therapeutic, emphatic and relational listening build upon overlapping listening skills, such as discriminative, comprehensive, critical and active listening. Finally, on the opposite end of the effective listening skills described above is negative listening, identified by Carolyn Gwynn Coakley (1985) as listening egocentrically or from a self-centered perspective, engaging in negative attitudes such as feelings of superiority and negative behaviors, such as constantly interrupting, verbal aggression, and apathy.
