ABSTRACT
Every good conversation starts with good listening. Listening is so important that many top employers provide listening skills training for their employees. Many successful leaders and entrepreneurs credit their success to effective listening skills. The infant begins to respond to the world by hearing and listening and he has to listen before he can speak. Listening therefore involves both nonverbal behaviour and verbal behaviour and can be divided into three clusters of skills: attending, following and reflecting skills. The five paralinguistic qualities we listen to are: intonation, rate, volume, clarity and fluency. The intonation pattern not only helps to communicate our emotion but also helps the listener know which words to pay attention to. R. Bolton says that ‘one of the primary tasks of a listener is to stay out of the other’s way so that the listener can discover how the speaker views his situation’.
