ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the crucial importance of the skill of listening in personal and professional interaction. It reviews research that clearly shows the central role that listening plays across many contexts. In fact, listening is at the heart of communicative development, since the child has to learn to listen before learning to speak, learns to speak before learning to read and learns to read before learning to write. This means that it is a fundamental skill and the foundation for all the other communication skills. But listening is not something that just happens. Rather, it is a transactional process that involves carefully assimilating the speaker’s messages while simultaneously communicating that we have understood these. The processes of feedback, perception and cognition, which are all centrally involved in message assimilation, are reviewed. Listening is divided into two broad categories – active and passive – and it is shown how the former is crucial in interpersonal encounters. Within this, six main types of listening – discriminative, comprehension, evaluative, appreciative, empathic and dialogic – are detailed. The main obstacles to effective listening are reviewed, and the core verbal and nonverbal skills of active listening are identified.
