Here are three typical comments made by participants:. These comments reflect part of an awakening that is taking place in a number of management circles. Business is tied together by its systems of communication. This communication, businessmen are discovering, depends more on the spoken word than it does on the written word; and the effectiveness of the spoken word hinges not so much on how people talk as on how they listen.
It can be stated, with practically no qualification, that people in general do not know how to listen. They have ears that hear very well, but seldom have they acquired the necessary aural skills which would allow those ears to be used effectively for what is called listening.
For several years we have been testing the ability of people to understand and remember what they hear. At the University of Minnesota we examined the listening ability of several thousand students and of hundreds of business and professional people.
In each case the person tested listened to short talks by faculty members and was examined for his grasp of the content. These extensive tests led us to this general conclusion: immediately after the average person has listened to someone talk, he remembers only about half of what he has heard—no matter how carefully he thought he was listening.
What happens as time passes? In fact, after we have barely learned something, we tend to forget from one-half to one-third of it within eight hours; it is startling to realize that frequently we forget more in this first short interval than we do in the next six months. Behind this widespread inability to listen lies, in our opinion, a major oversight in our system of classroom instruction.
We have focused attention on reading, considering it the primary medium by which we learn, and we have practically forgotten the art of listening. About six years are devoted to formal reading instruction in our school systems. Little emphasis is placed on speaking, and almost no attention has been given to the skill of listening, strange as this may be in view of the fact that so much lecturing is done in college.
Certainly our teachers feel the need for good listening. Why then have so many years passed without educators developing formal methods of teaching students to listen?
We have been faced with several false assumptions which have blocked the teaching of listening. For example:. There is no denying that low intelligence has something to do with inability to listen, but we have greatly exaggerated its importance.
A poor listener is not necessarily an unintelligent person. To be good listeners we must apply certain skills that are acquired through either experience or training. If a person has not acquired these listening skills, his ability to understand and retain what he hears will be low.
This can happen to people with both high and low levels of intelligence. While some of the skills attained through reading apply to listening, the assumption is far from completely valid. Listening is a different activity from reading and requires different skills. Research has shown that reading and listening skills do not improve at the same rate when only reading is taught.
This means that in our schools, where little attention is paid to the aural element of communication, reading ability is continually upgraded while listening ability, left to falter along on its own, actually degenerates. As a fair reader and a bad listener, the typical student is graduated into a society where the chances are high that he will have to listen about three times as much as he reads.
The barriers to listening training that have been built up by such false assumptions are coming down. Educators are realizing that listening is a skill that can be taught.
In Nashville, for example, the public school system has started training in listening from elementary grades through high school. Listening is also taught in the Phoenix school system, in Cincinnati, and throughout the state of North Dakota. About two dozen major universities and colleges in the country now provide courses in listening. At the University of Minnesota we have been presenting a course in listening to a large segment of the freshman class.
We have also given a course in listening for adult education classes made up mostly of business and professional people. These people have made some of the highest gains in listening ability of any that we have seen.
During one period, 60 men and women nearly doubled their listening test scores after working together on this skill one night a week for 17 weeks.
At least a start on the first of these two educational elements can be made by readers of this article; a certain degree of awareness is developed by merely discussing factors that affect listening ability. Later we shall discuss some steps that might be taken in order to work at the second element.
In general, people feel that concentration while listening is a greater problem than concentration during any other form of personal communication. Actually, listening concentration is more difficult. When we listen, concentration must be achieved despite a factor that is peculiar to aural communication, one of which few people are aware. Basically, the problem is caused by the fact that we think much faster than we talk. The average rate of speech for most Americans is around words per minute.
This rate is slow going for the human brain, which is made up of more than 13 billion cells and operates in such a complicated but efficient manner that it makes the great, modern digital computers seem slow-witted.
People who study the brain are not in complete agreement on how it functions when we think, but most psychologists believe that the basic medium of thought is language. Certainly words play a large part in our thinking processes, and the words race through our brains at speeds much higher than words per minute.
This means that, when we listen, we ask our brain to receive words at an extremely slow pace compared with its capabilities. It might seem logical to slow down our thinking when we listen so as to coincide with the word-per-minute speech rate, but slowing down thought processes seems to be a very difficult thing to do. When we listen, therefore, we continue thinking at high speed while the spoken words arrive at low speed. In the act of listening, the differential between thinking and speaking rates means that our brain works with hundreds of words in addition to those that we hear, assembling thoughts other than those spoken to us.
To phrase it another way, we can listen and still have some spare time for thinking. The use, or misuse, of this spare thinking time holds the answer to how well a person can concentrate on the spoken word. Case of the disenchanted listener. In our studies at the University of Minnesota, we find most people do not use their spare thinking time wisely as they listen.
Let us illustrate how this happens by describing a familiar experience:. A, the boss, is talking to B, the subordinate, about a new program that the firm is planning to launch. B is a poor listener. In this instance, he tries to listen well, but he has difficulty concentrating on what A has to say. A starts talking and B launches into the listening process, grasping every word and phrase that comes into his ears.
Subconsciously, B decides to sandwich a few thoughts of his own into the aural ones that are arriving so slowly. There is plenty of time for B to do just what he has done, dash away from what he hears and then return quickly, and he continues taking sidetracks to his own private thoughts.
Indeed, he can hardly avoid doing this because over the years the process has become a strong aural habit of his. But, sooner or later, on one of the mental sidetracks, B is almost sure to stay away too long.
When he returns, A is moving along ahead of him. At this point it becomes harder for B to understand A, simply because B has missed part of the oral message. The private mental sidetracks become more inviting than ever, and B slides off onto several of them.
Slowly he misses more and more of what A has to say. When A is through talking, it is safe to say that B will have received and understood less than half of what was spoken to him. A major task in helping people to listen better is teaching them to use their spare thinking time efficiently as they listen.
We found that good listeners regularly engage in four mental activities, each geared to the oral discourse and taking place concurrently with that oral discourse. All four of these mental activities are neatly coordinated when listening works at its best. It is a skill that some people need to work at harder than others. People who have difficulty concentrating are typically poor listeners. Listening in a second language requires even greater focus.
Like babies, we learn this skill by listening to people who already know how to speak the language. This may or may not include native speakers.
For practice, you can listen to live or recorded voices. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content.
Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Richard Nordquist. English and Rhetoric Professor. Richard Nordquist is professor emeritus of rhetoric and English at Georgia Southern University and the author of several university-level grammar and composition textbooks.
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