Effective Listening Skills

Listening Skills Introduction

• Study session provides a definition and explanation of listening and its contexts
• Discusses how listening is a skill that can be acquired and cultivated
• Introduces strategies for effective listening and different types of listening
• Explains the relationship between listening and note-taking
• Highlights the impact of listening skills on academic performance and relationships outside academia

Learning Outcomes

• Define and explain listening
• Enumerate ways to acquire and cultivate listening skills
• Identify how listening skills affect academic performance
• Show how acquired skills influence relationships in society

Listening and the Lecture Method

• Listening is the ability to receive, perceive, and decode meaning from a lecturer's knowledge dissemination
• It's a receptive skill in language and communication needed to achieve communicative competence for academic excellence
• Knowledge is communicated in a university environment through lectures
• Duty is to capture the essence of lectures in notes, which requires effective listening
• Many factors can cause unproductive listening, but strategies exist to ensure effective listening

What is listening and why is it important?

• Listening is the ability to receive, perceive, and decode the meaning of spoken words
• Communication is impossible without listening

Factors Responsible for Ineffective and Unproductive Listening

• Physical environment: A noisy or poorly ventilated room inhibits effective listening
• Physiological condition: Speech defects, pronunciation problems, and intonation of the lecturer can hinder communication
• Psychological condition: The listener's emotional state greatly impacts listening efforts

What situations can make listening unproductive?

• Noise, speech defects, pronunciation problems, intonation, and the listener's state of mind can all make listening unproductive

Strategies for Enhancing Listening Skills

• Eye Contact: Helps to connect the listener's mind with the speaker and establishes physical readiness to process information
• Identify and Concentrate on the content of the lecture: Focus on the information or message being conveyed
• Repress all forms of emotional attachment: Avoid prejudices resulting from religious, cultural, or financial biases
• Avoiding distractions: Minimize internal and external noises, such as music, classmates talking, and the lecturer's mannerisms
• Listening as Mental challenge: Psychologically stimulate interest in the lecture to pick out important details
• Ask Mental Questions: Process the lecture's details by asking questions about its main thrust and its relation to prior knowledge
• Avoid hasty Generalizations and Conclusions: Patiently allow the speaker to finish the point before drawing conclusions

What must you do to enhance your listening skills?

• Maintain eye contact with the lecturer
• Identify and concentrate on the lecture's content
• Suppress emotions related to the subject or personal feelings
• Avoid distractions
• See listening as a mental challenge
• Ask mental questions relating to past knowledge
• Avoid hasty generalizations and conclusions

Formal and Informal Listening

• Two types of listening: formal and informal
• Formal listening: Done for specific purposes in formal contexts
• Involves comprehending lectures, and remembering formulas or concepts
• May involve evaluating or criticizing theories, analyzing methods, and outlining historical developments
• Used to learn critical tools for analyzing literary texts
• Purposes are not mutually exclusive
• Informal listening: Occurs during normal conversations
• Essential for improving relationships

Differentiate between formal and informal listening

• Formal listening: Takes place in specific formal environments such as a University
• Informal listening: Takes in course of regular normal conversations with people around

Listening and Note-taking

• Impossible to remember everything without notes, even with excellent listening skills
• Note-taking: Keeps a record of a speaker's message and essential points from written materials
• Task is to keep a good record of all lectures and reading materials in order to perform well
• Taking good notes becomes an essential part of studying through this learning process

Requirements of Effective Note-taking

• Recognize the main ideas
• Identify relevant information
• Devise a personal system of recording information
• Reduce content to note form
• Possess skills in sentence reduction, summary, and paraphrasing
• Correctly cite and reference sources

Strategies for Effective Note-taking

• Define the purpose for listening/reading to guide note-taking
• Identify the function/purpose of the lecture or text

Strategies for Effective Note-taking

• Identifying the function and purpose of a text or a lecture is next in the line of strategies for note-taking
• This refers to your ability to make out the potentially important information from the lecture or the reading text
• You can begin to do an overview of the outline of the lecture or text simultaneously as you listen or read
• Text by reading the title, preface, foreword, and abstract of the textbook
• Read the table of contents, the introduction, and skim the material to know the topic as well as the general organization of the text.
• Understand lecturers utilize different teaching methodologies.
• Having firsthand information on the organizing principles of the lecturer or textbook is necessary
• The lecturer's or text's organizing principles may encompass
  • Steps or stages of a process or event
  • Progression from general to specific ideas
  • Transitions from simple to complex notions
  • Exploration of problems and solutions
  • Examination of causes and results
  • Arrangement from the largest to the smallest sections
  • Differentiation between well-known and lesser-known ideas
  • Prioritization from the most to the least important points
  • Sequencing from past to present ideas
• Include own thoughts in the notes
• Difficult to stop the lecturer to ask for a review of what has been said so far
• Note-taking strategies apply to live lectures that enhance comprehension
• Include activities before, during and after the lecture

Before the lecture, you can engage in the following:

• Revising previous lectures
• Reading about the topic
• Checking the meaning of new words
• Preparing the format for note-taking
• Arrive for the lecture in time to sit where you can have close contact with the lecturer

During the lecture session the you will need to:

• Listening to and simultaneously distinguish between the lecture's main points, elaborations, examples, repetitions, re-statements, etc
• transitional words like in addition, however, moreover, consequently are often deployed to mark movement from introduction to the body and conclusion or summary of the lecture
• Look out for the lecturer's use of non-verbal cues to convey meaning, such as facial expressions, gesticulations, and body movement
• Keenly observe the lecturer's illustrations and demonstrations with visual cues contained in visual instructional materials and illustrations and demonstrations with visual cues as may be contained in visual instructional materials and how these are labeled
• Listen for the lecturer's phonological cues such as voice changes, accent, word stress, speed and emotional nuances

After the lecture you would need to :

• Revise or review the lecture notes as soon as possible and compare notes with other course-mates
• Tidy up handwriting and fill in any missing bits
• Try out a summary of the lecture in his/her own words

Note-taking additional tips

• Do not attempt to write what the lecturer is saying verbatim
• Use of “shorthand” in recording your thoughts and other observations
• Use of symbols, abbreviations, and concept maps or diagrams
  • meaning “gives”, “causes”, “leads to”, “results in” ≠ meaning "not equal to/not the same as"
  • meaning “equivalent to” ¶ meaning “paragraph" @ meaning "at" & meaning "and"
  • meaning “more/plus/and” c.f.meaning “confer/compare" i.e meaning "that is” NB meaning "note well" diff.meaning "different" gov meaning "government” NEC meaning “necessary” no. meaning "number" ed. meaning "editor edn. meaning "edition” dev.meaning “development” L1 meaning "first language" cd. meaning "could" exc.meaning "except" incl.meaning “including"

Study Session Summary

• Effective Listening is essential to have academic a success
• Certain factors may make effective listening difficult, if not impossible
• Strategies for Enhancing Listening Skills
• The difference between formal and informal listening
• There is a connection between listening and effective note taking