ABSTRACT
LISTENING AS A CRITICAL COMMUNICATION COMPETENCY As you know, we feel strongly that listening is both a critical communication competency and a critical life competency. In fact, listening may well be the “key for the development and enhancement of language and learning skills.”1 Think about what would happen if a piece of information were important to your success and you didn’t have the skills or abilities to understand the message as the sender intended. As communication professor Charles Swanson said, “Those who listen, learn. Those who do not or cannot listen, find the classroom frustrating.”2 Of course, this frustration isn’t limited to the classroom. It also extends to other aspects of our lives. When you find yourself in a situation where you have failed to get information you need to respond appropriately to a friend or to complete a task properly, don’t you feel frustrated? Chances are you also feel frustrated when other people don’t listen to you. For example, how do you feel when you tell someone something that is important to you but that person ignores you? Clearly we can’t communicate at all if no one is listening. As the receiving component of the communication process, listening is essential to the completion of the act of communication. According to education professor Joseph Beatty, a “good listener focuses her attention on the other’s communication in order to understand the other’s meaning or experience.”3 He went on to say that we need to understand the other party to achieve “a kind of fidelity to the meaning or intention of the other.”
