Pod Lecture 4 - Contexts and types of listening

In this episode, the speaker discusses the different contexts and types of listening. Contexts refer to different situations in which people listen, such as public speaking, small group communication, and interpersonal communication. Each context has its own dynamics and requires different listening behaviors. The speaker also mentions that contexts can be narrowed down to specific areas, like interpersonal health communication. The speaker then introduces the five types of listening: discriminative, appreciative, comprehensive, therapeutic, and critical. These types are not personal preferences, but specific skills or areas of emphasis needed to achieve certain goals. The speaker focuses on discriminative listening, which is about distinguishing and understanding sounds. The speaker also mentions that we learn to discriminate sounds in our own language from a young age. The episode concludes with information about a quiz and a response question asking about the listener's interest in Hey, everybody. We have two tasks to accomplish in this episode. First, we need to contextualize listening, so I want to talk about listening contexts, and then we'll talk about different types of listening, which some people also call listening styles. So first are the contexts. People listen differently in different contexts, and there are lots of reasons for this. For example, we may just have different goals or desired outcomes depending on the characteristics of the situation we find ourselves in, and I'll give some examples in a moment, but those situations are what we mean by contexts. And we may need to adopt subtly different listening behaviors to achieve those goals that we have, and those different listening behaviors are what I mean by listening types. So to the contexts, there are two different sets of contexts that we could use. First, we have what I think of as the traditional list of communicative contexts. Public speaking, for example, is a context. Small group communication is a context. Interpersonal communication, that is, communication with one other person is a context, and even intrapersonal communication is a context, and that's communication with yourself. These contexts all differ from one another in important ways. For example, in public speaking, there's an audience and speaker dynamic, and the verbal communication is usually decidedly one way compared to a different context, let's say small group communication, where you might have five people sitting around a table at a committee meeting or a study group, and so the dynamics of that small group context are just going to be very different from the public speaking context. And then, you know, they would be very different again if we change the situation from five people to just two people. That would take us from the small group context and put us into the interpersonal context, whereas before, you as a group member might have been expected to do one-fifth of the talking. Now, in an interpersonal dyad, you're expected to do about half of the talking in most cases, you know. So, those are some of the traditional contexts that the discipline of communication has studied, and these are all applicable to the study of listening specifically as well. And, you know, you'll see whole classes in college communication curriculums devoted to understanding these contexts and the skills required to succeed in them. You know, we have interpersonal communication and small group communication among others. The other way to think about context is to pick one of the traditional domains and isolate a specific site or area of life within it. So, for example, instead of speaking generally about the interpersonal communication context, we could talk about, say, the interpersonal health context. So, you know, that's drilling down into some specific site. If you're sitting in an exam room talking to a doctor, the dynamics of that conversation are not the same as if you were sitting in a restaurant talking to your friend, say, even though both of those examples would involve a one-on-one conversation. So, we could come up with an endless list of examples of communication contexts this way. Something counts as its own context here if it's a place in which certain patterns of communication are recognizable and reliably repeat themselves. So, the health communication context. We might talk about business communication, communication in education, religious communication, communication in politics, and so on and on. You might have noticed on the course calendar for this course that we have several modules ahead of us that focus on some of these specific contexts of listening. One of the readings for this module focuses in on relationally oriented listening in the interpersonal context. And it also talks a lot about listening types. So let's shift gears now to talk about listening types. As I mentioned, you might also see these sometimes referred to as listening styles. I don't really like the term listening styles because I feel like it can be misleading. These types of listening are not so much personal preferences, you know, styles, as they are just, you know, more specific skills or micro-skills or areas of emphasis that are sometimes called for to achieve a specific goal. So, the five types of listening are as follows. Discriminative listening, appreciative listening, comprehensive listening, therapeutic listening, and critical listening. These types of listening are all outlined well in the reading. And I'm only going to talk about one or two of them here, but you should know all of them. So be sure to read the text closely, as always. And of course, you know, later on in the semester, we'll talk about each of these in turn. But for now, we need an overview, and so that's what the text provides. One of the things that I do want to note is about discriminative listening. In this case, the word discriminative does not refer to stereotyping or to discriminating against, quote unquote. Rather, in this case, the word is used in the sense of to be discerning. For example, when we say that someone has a discriminating palate, we're talking about how they have the ability to recognize quality in food or drink, etc. Some people are really skilled wine tasters and can tell like where the grapes were grown or what type of grape was used, etc. So that's the kind of sense that we're getting at with the term discriminative listening. This is the most basic type of listening, discriminative listening. And it is very simply about telling sounds apart. Who is making the sound? Where is the sound coming from? What is the sound? Is it a human voice? If so, are they speaking to me? Or, you know, are they speaking a language that I can understand? Can I make out the words? Or is there too much noise in the environment? Or are they talking too softly? All those questions come up when we think about discriminative listening. So this type of listening is when we are working hard to make sure that we simply catch what is being said. We're not judging it, which would be critical listening. Our only goal in discriminative listening is to make sure that you hear the sounds that you're trying to listen for and you can pick them out among the other sounds that might be competing. The text notes that we learn to discriminate between sounds within our own language when we are very young. And as we grow up, we become unable to discriminate between phonemes or sounds in other languages. I think that's really cool. And it shows how the study of listening overlaps with the study of linguistics. Listening, as we'll see throughout the semester, overlaps with so many different, you know, areas of life and areas of study. So linguistics will come up every now and then. All right. Let's do some closed episode stuff before I let you go. I want to mention the quiz for this module and also the response question for this episode. Remember that in general, there's going to be one quiz per module. The quiz can draw questions from all of the readings assigned for the module and all of the episodes for that module. The quiz for this module is going to ask you to look at what happens when we overlap the two concepts that we've been talking about over the last few minutes. On the one hand, we have listening contexts. And on the other hand, we have listening types. I have found that it can be instructive to pick a context and then imagine what the various listening types might look like in that context or vice versa. You can almost imagine like a matrix or a chart with the listening types along the x-axis and the communication contexts along the y-axis. And then imagine, you know, situations to illustrate each scenario where the two intersect. So, for example, one, you know, potential communication scenario that I can imagine was let's say that someone was introducing themselves at an AA meeting, Alcoholics Anonymous. We could ask ourselves what is the listening context and then what is the listening type that's most likely to be used in that context. So, when people are introducing themselves at an AA meeting and talking in general, the context, of course, I feel like would be small group because it's usually a small group of people who are meeting. And as for the listening types, as we think through them, discriminative, appreciative, comprehensive, therapeutic, and critical, the most likely one would be therapeutic because they are there for a specific therapeutic purpose. By the way, I will put a visual illustration of what I'm talking about here in the transcript for this episode. So, you might see some other questions like that that give you a scenario and ask you to identify the type and the context. Finally, let's close with the response question. Remember that there will always be a response question embedded somewhere in each episode, and you can enter those responses on Brightspace. This episode's question is going to be about context and types. Which listening context or type are you most interested to learn more about this semester and why? It can be one from the readings or lecture or it could be one that we haven't mentioned yet at all. The context or type you pick might be a context that you think you tend to thrive in or one in which you think that you struggle in. Personally, one of the types of listening that I think about a lot is comprehensive listening. As you see in the reading, comprehensive listening is listening for content. It's also called informative listening or full listening, and it involves comprehending the speaker's message. The example that's always used here is when someone is asking for directions and you're listening to someone give you directions, it's really important to remember the whole message, the step-by-step of when to turn, where, and stuff. That's a unique listening task. We're not judging the person or evaluating what they're saying. We're not listening for enjoyment like we might in appreciative listening. We just really need to listen to the whole message because we have to act on it. One of the reasons I'm interested in it is just because it comes up in education a lot. As a student, we always want to listen to the whole message and comprehend it, see how it applies to our life. I've also been thinking about it a lot in health communication because there can be so many barriers to understanding a whole message because people are stressed out a lot of times when they're talking about their own health and people don't understand necessarily even what's being said because of how complex medical stuff is. Anyway, if I were answering my own response question, I would talk about comprehensive listening as the one I'm most excited to learn more about because I think it's used in education and health and those are areas of life that I'm interested in right now. Okay, that's all for now. Thank you, as always, for listening. See you in the next episode.