EFFECTIVE LANGUAGE SKILLS

2. Most people, most of the time, take listening for
granted, it’s something that just happens.
Listening is perhaps the most important of all
interpersonal skills and SkillsYouNeed has many pages
devoted to the subject, see Listening Skills for an
introduction.

3. There are 3 types of listening skills
Specific Listening skill
General Listening skill
Therapeutic or Empathic Listening skill

4.  Discriminative and comprehensive listening are
prerequisites for specific listening types.
 Listening types can be defined by the goal of the
listening.

5. The three main types of listening most common in
interpersonal communication are:
 Informational Listening (Listening to Learn)
 Critical Listening (Listening to Evaluate and
Analyse)
 Therapeutic or Empathetic Listening (Listening
to Understand Feeling and Emotion)

6.  The process of informational listening focuses on
the ability of an individual to understand a speaker's
message. It is a huge part of everyday life, and failing to
understand the concept of informational
listeningcan be very detrimental to one's quality of
life and to their contribution to society.

7.  We can be said to be engaged in critical
listening when the goal is to evaluate or scrutinise
what is being said.
 Critical listening is a much more active behaviour than
informational listening and usually involves some sort
of problem solving or decision making.

8. Empathic listening involves attempting to
understand the feelings and emotions of the
speaker – to put yourself into the speaker’s shoes and
share their thoughts.

9. Here are FIVE types of listening,
starting with basic
discrimination of sounds and
ending in deep communication.

10.  Discriminative listening is the most basic type of
listening, whereby the difference between difference
sounds is identified. If you cannot hear differences,
then you cannot make sense of the meaning that is
expressed by such differences.

11.  The next step beyond discriminating between
different sound and sights is to make sense of them.
 The same is true, of course, for the visual components
of communication, and an understanding of body
language helps us understand what the other person is
really meaning.

12.  Critical listening is listening in order to evaluate and
judge, forming opinion about what is being said.
Judgment includes assessing strengths and
weaknesses, agreement and approval.

13.  Biased listening happens when the person hears only
what they want to hear, typically misinterpreting what
the other person says based on the stereotypes and
other biases that they have.

14.  In evaluative listening, or critical listening, we make
judgments about what the other person is saying. We
seek to assess the truth of what is being said.
 Evaluative listening is particularly pertinent when the
other person is trying to persuade us, perhaps to
change our behavior and maybe even to change
our beliefs.