User talk:Grahambodie

July 2011

Hello Grahambodie. If you are affiliated with some of the people, places or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest. In keeping with Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy, edits where there is a conflict of interest, or where such a conflict might reasonably be inferred, are strongly discouraged. If you have a conflict of interest, you should avoid or exercise great caution when:

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Addition

Have moved this here. I imagine that you wrote it. Here however it says that it is owned by John Wiley and Sons[1]

Often the publisher takes ownership and the author is not allowed to use it themselves. Also we need to verify that you are indeed the author through WP:OTRS.

Best Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 23:32, 21 May 2016 (UTC)

"=== A Brief History of Listening Research in Communication Studies === Because of its inherent applicability to a range of life settings, listening is a topic of interest that spans the academic landscape. Within Communication Studies, the history of listening research in many ways parallels the history of the discipline. Over time, conceptualizations have shifted from representations of listening as a simple, passive activity, to a more active mode of information processing similar in many respects to reading, to a complex phenomenon that can be studied from several theoretical points of view. Table 1 presents a sample of the definitions of listening generated over the last 100 years. The following sections trace the evolution of defining listening from early conceptualizations driven by a linear model of communication to more contemporary conceptualizations that stress behavior in context.

Table 1: A Sample of Listening Definitions

Source	Definition
Rankin (1926)	The ability to understand spoken language.
Nichols (1948)	The comprehension of expository materials presented orally in a classroom situation.
Brown & Carlsen (1955)	The aural assimilation of spoken symbols in a face-to-face speaker audience situation, with both oral and visual cues present.
Spearritt (1962)	The active process involved in attach[ing] meaning to sounds.
Barker (1971)	The selective process of attending to, hearing, understanding, and remembering aural symbols.
Weaver (1972)	A process that takes place when a human organism receives data orally.
Steil, Barker, & Watson (1983)	Consists of four connected activities – sensing, interpreting, evaluating, and responding.
Wovin & Coakley (1988)	The process of receiving, attending to, and assigning meaning to aural stimuli.
ILA (1995)	The process of receiving, constructing meaning from and responding to spoken and/or nonverbal messages.
Bostrom (2011)	The acquisition, process, and retention of information in the interpersonal context.
Brownell (2013)	An overt behavior that conceptualizes the teaching and training process.

Listening as the Comprehension of Aural Information

Like much of the early work in Communication Studies, the earliest conceptualizations of listening were based in the framework of speech pedagogy. In line with the linear conceptualization of communication more generally, early writings discussed listening as a passive activity, something that does not take much effort and that can be controlled by “good” speakers; that is, by crafting a listener-centered message, speakers can dictate how people process and respond to spoken language. Research on public address and debate, for instance, was concerned with the relative effectiveness of variables such as vocal variety and speech content (e.g., factual vs. emotional arguments) on the attitudes and opinions of audiences. Similar interests were apparent in research by mass communication scholars on the impact of different styles of speaking on the radio. A similar trend carried over to research during World War II that attempted to study how speaker intelligibility and articulation influenced a pilot’s ability to listen “accurately and … [report] back accurately what is heard” and to work concerned with attitude change that predated mainstream compliance gaining research.

In an early review, Gilkinson highlighted four primary variables used to measure “the influence of a speaker upon an audience” (p. 180) which included attitude scales, opinion polls, retention tests, and ratings (or judgments about the speech). The third class of measures, retention tests, was described as measuring “the amount of detailed content of speeches remembered by audiences” (p. 181), a definition that has been attached to the term listening comprehension ever since.

Early measures of listening comprehension were derived from existing measures of reading comprehension and focused exclusively on memory for facts. Several scholars pointed to important conceptual and operational problems with these measures. One of the most influential was Kelly who suggested that recall “accuracy perhaps depends primarily upon mental factors that are far from specific to audition” (p. 139). Although most subsequent work cited Kelly, research conducted prior to his work suggested that processing speech was a distinct language ability. In addition, several large-scale factor analytic studies published around the time of Kelly’s work proposed “a constellation of interrelated listening abilities." By the late 1960s, listening scholars began to define listening as a set of cognitive processes, some of which are related to other language facilities like reading, some of which are related to mental acuity and intelligence, and some of which are unique to aural processing.

This line of thinking did two things. First, it positioned listening almost exclusively as a cognitive phenomenon. Indeed, several scholars were quite vocal that “overt responding was part of a new communication cycle, with the response constituting an initiative of the sender.". The dichotomization of listening and speaking remains a sticking point for many communication theorists today. Second, by separating listening into its constituent parts (e.g., hearing, understanding, remembering), researchers claimed an ability to develop more valid tests that could be shown unique, but complementary to, tests of other language abilities. Test development efforts defined listening research during the 1970s and 1980s, and multidimensional tests of comprehension proliferated. Unfortunately, the validity profiles of these tests raise serious concerns about construct validity.

Listening as a Complex of Skills

Perhaps the most well-known attempt to identify skills necessary for “good” listening was Nichols’s study of the factors influencing lecture comprehension. Undergraduates in this study were asked to listen to six, 10-minute lectures and answer a multiple choice test after each. Student participants averaged 68% on the composite listening test with higher scores related to both individual (e.g., intelligence) and situational (e.g., listener fatigue) factors. Subsequent interviews with instructors of students scoring in the top and bottom tertiles of the test revealed that good, compared to poor, listeners were “more attentive during classroom activities and more conscientious in their…work habits” (p. 160). Nichols used these data to provide an empirical backdrop to the previously articulated argument that listening should be taught, not presumed in the communication process and that there were specific skills and habits that were best taught (Adams, 1938; Nichols, 1947; Wiksell, 1946). Over time, these factors became known as the “Nichols 10” (Nichols, 1987) and were suggested as a universal set of “bad habits” to avoid when attempting to listen to another.

One of the more important discussions sparked by defining listening as a set of identifiable skills is whether a generic set of behaviors can be constructed and applied in several contexts. The assumption that listeners should enact a universal set of behaviors was evident in the writing of Nichols as well as others who seemed to want to deduce a magic formula for listening well.

Listening as a Contextually-Situated Activity

When used to refer to an action that occurs in close, personal relationships, listening generally suggests an active presence of another individual who is typically acting with empathic tendencies. In close relationships, listening signals affection, support, empathy, and understanding; “to listen” is a positive characterization made of others who are attentive and empathic during interaction. Listening is an orientation toward openness to being completely aware (i.e., “empty”) to what is happening in and around us. In other words, listening is a relationally constituted process, something that occurs within a dyadic system and helps to define that system.

Of course, listening does not connote the same types of attributes in non-intimate relationships or in other settings not defined by closeness or affiliation. For instance, people do not necessarily need their cashier to signal affection, though we may need him or her to understand that we have a coupon for cereal. Similarly, we might want to listen for appreciative purposes like when we get lost in our music or a pleasant medley of bird calls in the wild. Of the first to recognize that listeners often direct their resources for different purposes were Wolvin and Coakley who outlined a typology of five reasons for listening. At the most basic level, they placed discriminative listening, listening in order to monitor our surroundings or attend to specific auditory or visual stimuli, and comprehensive listening, or listening to understand. All listeners are thought to utilize these basic forms of listening, though not all listeners have the same level of ability to do so well. Likewise, in some contexts listeners are called to listen for higher order purposes, namely toward appreciative, therapeutic, or critical means. Appreciative listening is the process of listening to appreciate either what another is saying or sounds for one’s own enjoyment. Therapeutic listening is used to describe listening to others as they talk about stressful or otherwise negative life events. Finally, critical listening requires moving beyond understanding to evaluating and making judgements about a message’s veracity or consistency with other arguments.

From Listening is to Listening as

Although the sub-titles used thus far in this entry suggest listening has always been viewed this way, much of the history of listening scholarship has been marked by debate over defining the term – attempting to finish the sentence with listening is as opposed to listening as. Early work was occupied by disentangling listening from related mental constructs like memory and related language abilities like reading. Sparked largely by Glenn’s content analysis of existing definition of listening, the 1990s was marked by efforts to create a consensual definition of listening and, subsequently, measures that assess all of its constituent parts.

Arguments over “the correct” definition of listening seem quite similar to arguments about communication more generally. Early communication scholarship was marked by attempts to find “the correct” definition of communication, attempts that were subsequently replaced by an attitude that values multiple perspectives on inquiry. The ideal that a single, all-encompassing definition of listening should be created and sustained is slowly being supplanted by the view that listening should be treated as a theoretical term.

When treated as a theoretical term, listening is allowed to take on various meanings depending on the practical purpose pursued by an individual or team of scholars. It also moves scholars away from concerns over definitional harmony and towards attempting to understand listening in all its complexity, as simultaneously a cognitive, affective, and behavioral phenomenon (or as primarily one of these as the theory dictates; see Table 1). Within Communication Studies, listening is often portrayed as a key component to effective communication and is cast as a fundamental competency in close, personal and professional relationships as well as for students of all ages. Even so, because the term has yet to be fully incorporated into a variety of theoretical frameworks that pose distinct roles and functions for the cognitive, affective, and behavioral components of this complex social skill, the potential of its impact is not fully realized. Most notable is the fact that as a result of attempting to create and sustain a single, all-encompassing definition of listening, the theoretical association between listening and other phenomena has largely been ignored. As summarized above, listening research has been conducted primarily in the service of creating lists of skills and competencies that can be taught and measured (putatively in similar ways regardless of context). Although assessment rubrics and comprehension tests have been constructed in line with theoretical frameworks, the lion’s share of listening research has been conducted void of theoretical concern. The landscape is, however, changing.

From Studying Listeners to Studying Listening in Action

Of the research on listening conducted to date, cognitive and affective components have been afforded greater attention than behavioral components. As a cognitive phenomenon, listening has been primarily measured with comprehension tests given after the presentation of some aural stimulus, usually a monologue. Scores are then compared for different groups of listeners or correlated with listener characteristics.

As a behavioral act, listening refers to what people do as they attempt to understand and retain information shared by others. What people do involves a range of individual verbal and nonverbal behaviors that function to demonstrate attention, understanding, responsiveness, and empathy; to encourage continued expression of thoughts and feelings of an interlocutor; and to aid in relational maintenance. Although specific behaviors are likely enacted to different degrees as well as have different impacts on outcomes depending on conversational, relational, and cultural contexts, much interpersonal scholarship draws from the framework of Carl Rogers on person-centered therapy and his humanistic approach to listen “actively”.Active listening

Janet Bavelas and her colleagues have spent several decades exploring how listeners constitute a “full partner in creating the dialogue”.[2] The operation of various listener behaviors are viewed by Bavelas et al. through Clark’s collaborative model and the notion of grounding, a sequential process engaged in collaboratively by speaker and addressee which results in mutual understanding. Research suggests that when listeners are allowed to freely participate in grounding (e.g., by not being distracted), the speaker tells a more coherent story (primarily fostered by behaviors such as backchanneling)."