Lecture No. 05 (Listening As A Skill).pdf

Lecture No. 05

1. 1
Functional English
HU-114
National University of Sciences & Technology (NUST)
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS)
Department of Humanities & Sciences
Course Instructor: Dr Samia Tahir
Week 2:
Lecture # 2

2. Today’s Lecture
•Listening as a skill
•The art of listening
•Three basic parts of
listening
•Interested vs
interesting approach
to listening.

3. The art of listening
Listen a hundred times, ponder a thousand
times, speak once.
•Difference between hearing and listening.
•Listening involves more than hearing someone out. It also
involves maintaining eye contact, watching the person’s 
body language, asking for clarifications and listening for the
unspoken message.

4. • A semiotician, Roland Barthes,
characterized the distinction between
listening and hearing.
“Hearing is a physiological phenomenon;
listening is a psychological act”.

5. On an average, we can speak around 120 to
words 150 words a minute. But the brain is
capable of processing 500 to 750 words a
minute.

6. Real Listening is an Active Process that has Three
Basic Steps:
•Hearing
•Understanding
•Judging

7. Kinds of listening
•Ignoring
•Selective listening
•Attentive listening
•Empathetic listening
Listening is a skill for resolving problems

8. •Our desire to talk-one of the biggest distractions
to listening.
•True listening is a skill which needs to be learnt
and practiced.
•Be interested rather than interesting.
“Seek first to understand, then to be
understood”

9. Good listeners listen with their faces
•Act like a good listener.
•Use the other bodily
receptors beside your ears.
•Encourage your speaker’s 
train of thoughts by using
receptive cues.
•Move your mind to
concentrate on what the
speaker is saying.

10. Reasons for ineffective listening
•Physical reasons
•Age and attitude
•Mind-set
•Language
•Careless listening

11. Things to remember!
•Studies have shown that if you are really listening intently, you
should feel tired after your speaker has finished. Effective listening is
an active rather than a passive activity.
•When you find yourself drifting away during a listening session,
change your body position.
•Meaning cannot just be transmitted as a tangible substance by the
speaker. It must also be stimulated or aroused in the receiver. The
receiver must therefore be an active participant for the cycle of
communication to be complete.

12. •When asking questions to gain more
information than you have been given, use
the word exactly to find out more detail.
•Avoid using why as it is often interpreted
as threatening and can result in people
feeling that they need to justify their
actions.

13. Listening Activity
•“A bike was coming at great speed from the south end of
the factory and trying to move towards the North end.
Even as it was trying to enter the lane, a truck coming
from inside the lane blocked its way. The biker tried to
overtake but was again stopped by a car coming behind
the truck. He came very near to dashing the car. The car
driver, thoroughly disgusted with the traffic, came out
and cursed the biker. Upset with all this, the biker turned
back with great difficulty and took the next lane.”

14. What did we get out of this game?
•Message gets lost while traveling (long
chain of communication);
•what we listen to and what we ignore are
two separate things;
•the manner in which we summarize,
interpret and recreate while listening is
very interesting.