Glossary
Glossary
Active (Reflective) Listening: is the skill of listening closely and reflecting back the information to the speaker.
Appreciative listening: allows individuals to listen for entertainment or enjoyment, such as when we listen to poetry or music.
Attention: that mental state in which there is an intense voluntary direction and concentration of consciousness, as in attentive listening.
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.
Constructive feedback: feedback that is descriptive and not judgmental.
Critical (Evaluative) listening: is used to evaluate a message before accepting or rejecting it.
Dialogic (Relational) listening: a type of active listening, takes into account the whole listening environment and seeks to enhance personal relationships.
Discriminative listening: allows individuals to separate fact, which is provable information, from opinion, which is more subjective and ambiguous.
Dogmatism: expressing strongly held opinions in a way that suggests they should be accepted without question (Encarta).
Egocentrism: is a self–centeredness, an interest in only what is relevant to our self.
Ethnocentrism is akin to egocentrism, but rather than being limited to our own personal interests we limit ourselves to the interests of our ethnic or cultural group.
Empathy: a feeling, perhaps intuitive, in which one individual identifies with another, in other words.
Hearing: essentially a physiological process, involves three interconnected stages: reception of sound waves, perception of sound in the brain, and auditory association.
Information overload: the constant, 24/7, flow of information, which can overload our ability to process messages.
Listening: the process of receiving, constructing meaning from, and responding to spoken and/or nonverbal messages.
Mindfulness: a state in which we are neither judging nor thinking but rather wholly present in the moment; it is an important strategy that helps us to enhance our attentiveness powers and improve listening skills.
Open questions: are questions that do not require a yes or no answer
Paraphrasing: re-wording what the speaker has said and mirroring the message in your own words
Paralinguistics: nonverbal communication related to voice, the way you sound to others, that is, the volume, pitch and rate of your voice.
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.
Visual mapping: diagramming, as of sentences, and using branching to illustrate major and subordinate ideas––as in the main thought, modifiers and dependent and independent clauses of a sentence.
