Defining Listening Goals
Defining Listening Goals
Defining listening goals is the place to begin as a competent listener. Defining a listening goal means being an active listener and taking responsibility for the outcome of a communication situation. As suggested above a competent listener is not passive but knows the value of being an active partner in a situation. Purdy & Borisoff (1991) recognized in Listening in Everyday Life that “listening is a 90–90 proposition—that both the speaker and the listener must take responsibility for effective and accurate communication” (22). This means first identifying what the speaker is trying to do and then figuring out your role and purpose as a listener.
So you should begin with general listening goals. First, the listener should have the goal to prepare for the listening situation, by being physically and mentally prepared to listen, including the desire to listen (without desire or motivation not much happens). Second, the listener should decide what to listen for: 1) Appreciation, 2) Information, 3) Understanding, and/or critical evaluation of information, 4) Evidence, arguments, 5) Mode of presentation, and 6) Situation.
We can apply listening goals with three sets of skills that build upon each other:
- Self–monitoring (awareness) skills
- Skills for appreciation and informational listening (learning)
- Skills for critical listening (thinking)
Self–monitor and become self–aware to recognize barriers to effective listening that get in the way of achieving our communication goals. Self–monitoring should include the obvious barriers discussed above, such as emotional reaction, reaction to trigger works (semantic noise), defensive response to unfamiliar or different ideas, and other intrapersonal noise. You should especially be aware of the tendency to jump to conclusions before you have heard all that the speaker has to say. Prejudging was mentioned above as a part of personal bias, but here (and below under critical/evaluative listening) the stress is on listening to the whole of a speech before making a judgment or forming an opinion. We should hear a speaker out so we have the “whole story” before we assume we have an understanding.
Listening skills for appreciation and information are important in their own right, but are also useful for critical/evaluative listening. Listening to an informative speech such as a lecture, news or other report is a common experience in our day to day lives. Learning from the experience of the speaker demands that we first are receptive to the speaker and more importantly, to his or her ideas.
We think of appreciative listening as appropriate for listening to plays, music or poetry (as suggested above), but appreciation is an attitude that leaves us open and favorable to a speaker and their message. Below we extend this concept as useful to critical listening, but first we discuss skills for informative listening, including “note–taking” skills which are useful for reviewing information or recall of information we want to later remember or evaluate. Recall can also include analog or digital recordings of a presentation, but that means listening to the whole of a presentation again (or skipping to specific parts) when we want to review it, whereas by taking notes we can use various tools such as outlining, visual mapping, summarizing, or reduction to key points/arguments, evidence or facts.
