How Well Do You Listen?!?

We spend about 70% of our waking day practicing one of the four forms of communication.  Within that 70%, we spend 9% writing (bloggers may have a higher percentage!), 16% reading something, 30% speaking, and 45% listening.  It is ironic that the communication skill we utilize the most is the skill least taught in school.  While we certainly may not need as much classroom time on listening as the other three, listening tips would benefit all aspects of students’ lives.  Here’s a discussion I hold early in the year with my speech classes.  Let me know what your thoughts are on this ~

Do you get irritated when people interrupt?  Or are you the one doing most of the interrupting?  Studies show that there may be significant differences between the sexes when it comes to stopping a speaker in mid-sentence.  Do you agree?

When a man and a woman are talking, for example, researchers say the man makes about 96 percent of the interruptions.  Men appear to have a few other gender-specific habits.  Some researchers say that men, for instance, have been taught since childhood to become problem solvers.  As a result, men tend to enter a conversation too quickly, and usually with a ready answer.  They fail to draw out the speaker with questions or to listen for more information before jumping to a conclusion.  Do you think these are generalized stereotypes or is there merit to this?

Deborah Tannen, author of a popular book on conversational styles called You Just Don’t Understand, states that most women use “rapport talk” as a way of establishing connections and relationships.  From childhood, she writes, women tend to listen for things they have in common with others.  Men, on the other hand, use “report talk” to preserve their independence and maintain status.  They do this primarily by showing knowledge and skill, and by holding center stage through storytelling or joking.  From childhood, men learn to use talking as a way to get and keep attention.  Consequently, they have a harder time learning to be good listeners.  Hmmm . . . more food for thought.

Regardless of gender differences, Grading Girl contemplates what can distort our listening skills ~

Filters That Can Distort Our Listening:

Education
Age

Biases

Attitude (pessimist or optimist)

Religion

Family

Experience

Emotions

Physical Condition

Morals

A good listener will . . .

Provide encouragement

Ask for explanations

Paraphrase the message

Summarize the message

Use non-verbal feedback

Now it’s time to look at yourself?  Do you listen or do you just hear?  Take GG’s little quiz to rate yourself as a listener ~

Answer “always,” “almost always,” “sometimes,” “almost never,” and “never”

~ Do you keep an open mind about the person speaking, and do you listen objectively?

~ Do you think about what is being said and how you might use this information in the future?

~ Do you concentrate on the speaker’s message and not on personal habits such as poor enunciation, nervous gestures, or poor grooming?

~ Do you find yourself interrupting others?

~ Do you tune out from time to time and daydream?

~ Do you tune out to think of what you are going to say next?

~ Do you look directly into the speaker’s eyes and tune out what is happening around you?

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What are the words to that song?

We all do this . . . we hear a song on the radio and we sing along without really being sure if we’re singing the real lyrics or not.   Sometimes we find out the real lyrics and we like ours better.  Believe it or not, there is an official term for misheard phrases or lyrics: mondegreens. We’ve all been guilty of creating mondegreens at one time or another. I recall, for instance, teasing my bro when he insisted that the lyrics to “Voices Carry” by ‘Til Tuesday were ‘Hush, keep it downtown’ instead of ‘keep it down now.’ [For the record, he also insisted the lyrics to "Good Riddance" by Green Day included 'It's something unpredictable, but in the end there's rain.' ] Sometimes the flubbed lyrics make just as much sense as the real thing; sometimes they’re funnier. The sampling of mondegreens below illustrate this point. How many of these have you fallen victim to and how many of these can you correctly match to the songs in which they’re sometimes heard?

Quizlet – Misheard Lyrics

1. “Village cheese is not my lover.”
2. “I’ll never leave your pizza burnin’.”
3. “Another one rides the bus.”
4. “Just another man named Monday.”
5. “Get your motor runnin’/Dead cat on the highway.”
6. “It tastes very nice, food of the parking lot.”
7. “Like detergent/Drunk for the very first time.”
8. “Wake me up to pour you cocoa.”
9. “But it’s better than drinking cologne.”
10. “The girl with colitis goes by.”

How many were you able to identify???

Little trick ~ when I find myself in a situation where I need to sing with a group (i.e. an assembly at school when we’re asked to sing the school song) and I don’t know all the lyrics, I mouth the word ‘watermelon’ repeatedly; the word is polysyllabic enough that my mouth keeps moving as if I know what I’m singing. . . works every time.

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