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Fostering and Assessing Critical Listening Skills in the Speech Course
Abstract
In this article we present the results of two listening assessments conducted in spring 2013 and fall 2013. Our primary goal is of a pedagogical nature and is concerned with the design and the testing of a tool that could measure students’ critical listening skill improvement during the span of a semester. A total of N = 370 students participated in two quasi-experimental studies in which we developed a program to foster and measure critical listening skills. Results show that students’ listening skills improved in specific aspects of critical listening at both times. Effects were larger in the second round due to adjustments to both the course curriculum and the assessment tool. Results support the impact of the intervention by modest to high effect sizes and the construct validity of the assessment tool. We consider the improvement that was found in the current study an important beginning and recommend that the practice of listening skills becomes an integral part of the curriculum at the undergraduate level.
... Critical listening skills play an integral role in students' learning processes in and outside the classroom. Inside the class context, students need critical listening skills as they should be able to separate facts from opinions, fantasy from reality, and accurate from inaccurate content and ideas from the teacher and their peers during all facets of the school day (Ediger, 2015;Ferrari-Bridgers et al., 2015). In today's society, which heavily relies on information transfer, young learners have easy access to multiple communication sources (e.g., the Internet, social media, radio, and television) and ...
... Critical listening skills incorporate discriminative and comprehensive listening skills but stretches well beyond it, activating multiple higher-order cognitive abilities. At this level, students should be able to determine and evaluate the quality, value, significance, accuracy, and truthfulness of the message and draw appropriate conclusions from it (Deveci, 2013;Ferrari-Bridgers et al., 2015;Floyd & Clements, 2005;Wallace, 2013). To be an effective critical listener, students have to possess different competencies, such as the ability to identify bias in the message, evaluate the speaker's arguments, analyze and uncover the speaker's intention, and separate facts from opinions (Al-Musalli, 2001;Deveci, 2013;Ferrari-Bridgers et al., 2015;Floyd & Clements, 2005;Fogelsong, 2016). ...
... At this level, students should be able to determine and evaluate the quality, value, significance, accuracy, and truthfulness of the message and draw appropriate conclusions from it (Deveci, 2013;Ferrari-Bridgers et al., 2015;Floyd & Clements, 2005;Wallace, 2013). To be an effective critical listener, students have to possess different competencies, such as the ability to identify bias in the message, evaluate the speaker's arguments, analyze and uncover the speaker's intention, and separate facts from opinions (Al-Musalli, 2001;Deveci, 2013;Ferrari-Bridgers et al., 2015;Floyd & Clements, 2005;Fogelsong, 2016). ...
This study aimed to provide a more comprehensive view on the relationship between metacognitive awareness, intrinsic and extrinsic listening motivation, and L1 primary school students’ critical listening skills. A critical listening test and different self-report questionnaires were administered to 649 native Dutch-speaking sixth-grade students. Quantitative data analysis techniques, including a series of one-way multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVAs) and a structural equation model (SEM) were used to analyze the data. The results indicated that high-level listeners were more aware of different factors of metacognition (i.e., person knowledge, problem-solving, and directed attention) and more intrinsically motivated to listen compared to average and low-level listeners. Further, complex structural relationships among students’ motivation, metacognitive awareness, and critical listening skills were found. The results showed that both intrinsic and extrinsic listening motivation were antecedents of students’ reported awareness of metacognition. The findings also suggested that metacognitive awareness mediated the relationship between motivation and critical listening skills.
Konuşmada aktarılanları incelemek, derinliğine inmek, karşılaştırmak, doğruluğunu, geçerliliğini ve tutarlılığını değerlendirmek şeklinde tanımlanan eleştirel dinleme, algılamanın ve eleştirel düşünmenin bir birleşimi olarak kabul edilir. Bu araştırmanın amacı, öğretmen adaylarının eleştirel dinlemeye yönelik tutumlarını çeşitli değişkenler açısından incelemektir. Nicel araştırma yöntemlerinden betimsel tarama modelinde gerçekleştirilen araştırmanın çalışma grubunu Bartın Üniversitesi Eğitim Fakültesinde İlköğretim Matematik Öğretmenliği, Sınıf Öğretmenliği, Sosyal Bilgiler Öğretmenliği ve Türkçe Öğretmenliği programlarında öğrenim gören 267’si kadın, 110’u erkek olmak üzere toplam 377 öğretmen adayı oluşturmuştur. Öğretmen adaylarının eleştirel dinleme tutumlarının cinsiyete, öğrenim görülen programa, sınıf düzeyine, genel not ortalamasına, günlük ortalama dinleyici olarak geçirilen süreye, anne ve baba eğitim durumuna göre incelendiği araştırmanın verileri Taşkın (2017) tarafından, öğretmen adaylarına yönelik geliştirilmiş olan “Eleştirel Dinleme Tutum Ölçeği” ile toplanmıştır. Verilerin analizinde SPSS Paket Programından yararlanılmış, iki değişken için bağımsız gruplar t-testi ve ikiden fazla değişken için tek yönlü varyans analizi kullanılmıştır. Araştırma bulgularına göre öğretmen adaylarının eleştirel dinleme tutumlarında öğrenim görülen programa, günlük ortalama dinleyici olarak geçirilen süreye, anne ve baba eğitim durumuna göre anlamlı bir farklılığın bulunmadığı; ölçeğin değerlendirme boyutunda cinsiyet değişkenine göre kadın öğrenciler, ölçeğin tamamında ve kavrama-analiz boyutlarında sınıf düzeyi değişkenine göre 4. sınıf öğrencileri lehine, ölçeğin tamamında ve analiz boyutunda genel not ortalamasına göre not ortalaması 3,51-4,00 olanlar lehine anlamlı farklılık olduğu tespit edilmiştir. Öğretmen adaylarının yüksek düzeyde eleştirel dinleme tutumuna sahip olmaları, araştırmanın bir diğer bulgusu olarak öne çıkmıştır.
Although several studies have demonstrated the importance of listening skills in the classroom and in the workplace, business administration college programs seldom include teaching listening as part of their curriculum because of content saturation and credit hours constraints. In this pilot study, we describe how integrating simple listening activities in the classroom, without making major modifications to the curriculum, improves students’ comprehension and test performance. The study demonstrates how exercising critical listening skills while taking a test has a positive effect on students’ retention of information and test scores.
While many tools exist to assess student content knowledge, there are few that assess whether students display the critical listening skills necessary to interpret the quality of a speaker’s message at the college level. The following research provides preliminary evidence for the internal consistency and factor structure of a tool, the Ferrari-Lynch-Vogel Listening Test (FLVLT), designed to assess critical listening by community college students. FLVLT data was collected from 915 students over three academic years at an urban community college. The findings of this research provide some initial evidence for the FLVLT’s effectiveness at measuring critical listening by community college students. Future research should seek to expand the analysis of FLVLT’s reliability and provide some initial evidence of validity.
In this article, the researchers discuss the implementation of the Ferrari, Lynch, and Vogel Listening Test (FLVLT) to two STEM areas: Mathematics and Computer Science. The goal of the present study was to assess the improvement in students’ mastery of critical listening skills and how listening can help students to retain information. After students were introduced to the subject matter, two specifically tailored listening assessment tools were designed. Pretests and posttests were then administered in an introductory algebra (n = 29 students) and a network fundamentals course (n = 13 students). These tests were administered approximately four weeks apart. The data show that the FLVLT model is reliable for judging students’ critical listening skills and curricular knowledge. Furthermore, a 12% and 20% improvement in students’ ability to match the content pattern to a spoken message was found. In addition, a correlational analysis suggested that improvement in critical listening skills helped students’ learning.
Without a doubt, listening is a critical facet of human communication. Within the field of communication studies, a central concern for listening scholars has been developing models of listening competence and arguing for its palliative effects in various contexts. Most commonly, listening is viewed as having affective, cognitive, and behavioral components. The purpose of this article is to outline a few issues in the measurement of listening as an affective, cognitive, and behavioral phenomenon and to advocate for more integrated research efforts.
Workers at a bank and a medical center provided 195 critical incident descriptions of effective and ineffective listening. Individual elements were identified and sorted into 38 categories which describe listening in the two work environments.Results indicate that listening is described in organizational settings as an interrelated set of concepts including attentiveness, verbal behavior, non- verbal behavior, attitudes, memory, and behavioral responses. This concept of listening differs from the classroom-oriented and counseling-oriented con cepts of listening which dominate much research and training.
For more than 50 years, business professionals and some researchers have held that effective listening is a highly desirable workplace skill (Cooper, 1997; Husband, Cooper, & Monsour, 1988; Nichols & Stevens, 1957; Rogers & Rothlisberger, 1952; Sypher, 1984). However, listening as an organizational variable continues to be seen as a “soft” skill worthy of little attention in the scholarly business literature, in the business classroom, and in organizations (Flynn & Faulk, in press). This paper presents an overview of academic research on listening in the business environment and raises a number of key research questions that guided discussion of the Business Context Division of the International Forum on Listening Research. This work is designed to foster rigorous listening research among scholars in a variety of academic business fields.
In this article, I attempt to deal with some of the complexities of text, ownership, memorization, and plagiarism. Arguing that plagiarism cannot be cast as a simple black-and-white issue, the prevention of which can be achieved via threats, warnings, and admonitions, I suggest that it needs to be understood in terms of complex relationships between text, memory, and learning. This is part of an attempt to explore more generally different relationships between learning, literacy, and cultural difference. I look first at the background to the notion of authorship and ownership of text, arguing that the way ownership and creativity are understood within European and U.S. contexts needs to be seen as a very particular cultural and historical development. By looking at shifting premodern, modern, and postmodern understandings of text and authorship, I show how the dominant modernist paradigm has always been filled with tensions and ambiguities. Then I discuss how these confusions around plagiarism lead to difficulties and hypocrisies in how textual borrowing is understood. I follow this examination of the development of the Western notion of textual ownership with a consideration of what it means to impose this view in a context where understandings of texts, ownership, and learning may be very different. By looking at learning in a Chinese context and also at the particularities of studying in Hong Kong, I show why we need much more subtle appreciations of the relationships between different approaches to texts. Finally, I discuss some general implications for understanding text, ownership, and learning.
Most reviews of “listening research” are narrow in scope, focusing only on research published by listening and communication scholars. Given that unique contributions to listening have been provided by scholars from disciplines as varied as psychology, anthropology, management, and linguistics, this review explores connections and divergences that span the academic landscape. After briefly introducing and reviewing listening related research from three primary areas—information processing, competent behavior, and individual differences—we offer a heuristic framework that ties these lines of study together and provides a structure for assessing and generating new listening research. A concluding section suggests lines of future investigation.
Listening research has not gained legitimacy as a field of study in communication primarily due to the lack of testable theories. Listening research is a challenge, as listening is performed cognitively and perceived behaviorally, but listening cognitions and behaviors are not always congruent (Witkin, 199095.
Witkin , B. R. ( 1990 ). Listening theory and research: The state of the art . Journal of the International Listening Association , 4 , 7 – 32 . [Taylor & Francis Online]View all references). Listening researchers have focused on the observable listening behaviors; however, results from these studies are not reliable due to the incongruency in cognitions and behaviors. Other listening studies have used verbal recall as a listening indicator; however, verbal recall often is undistinguishable from memory. Further, these studies have taken place in a linear context, so they would not be appropriate for use in conversational listening studies.The first step to developing listening theory is to create an instrument that produces a reliable measure of the cognitive listening process. This study (N = 360), grounded in cognitive psychology's working memory (WM) and capacity theories, demonstrates that the Conversational Listening Span (CLS) instrument can provide a valid measure of one's conversational listening capacity. The CLS represents the first step in building a listening model that is grounded in empirically supported research. This model, with measurable elements, can serve as the foundation for testable listening theories.
Listening, Sixth Edition takes an experiential approach to listening instruction, providing extensive applied examples and cases within the context of the HURIER listening model. The text encourages students to view listening as a process involving six interrelated components, which are developed along the parallel dimensions of theory and skill building. This new edition offers a companion website as well as additional and updated cases, in-text exercises, and questions for discussion. Throughout the text, new content has been added to address students’ world of evolving technology and expanding social boundaries. Included in the new edition: • The complexities of listening to social media and the unique challenges presented by mediated communication • New and expanded topics in Listening Challenges, including listening as it relates to career communication and business contexts • Suggested techniques for encouraging others to listen • The new requirements of listening across cultural and generational boundaries, emphasized throughout • Opening cases that present timely issues related to the listeners’ social responsibilities • A personal journal assignment in each chapter.
In two studies undergraduate students were given an original paragraph and several rewritten versions of the paragraph, some of which were plagiarized (e.g., without a citation, superficially modified from the original) and some correctly paraphrased. Students were asked to determine whether each rewritten version had been plagiarized or correctly paraphrased. Approximately 74% of the students in both studies correctly identified the paraphrased versions. However, some of the plagiarized versions were misidentified as having been correctly paraphrased by as many as 40% to 50% of the students. Results suggest that students are often unclear as to what constitutes plagiarism and correct forms of paraphrasing.
Research supports the point that listening skills play an important role in 21st century personal, academic, and professional success. This article argues that educators should include listening, a critical communication competency, in the oral communication course in the general education curriculum.
This paper argues that much of the conceptual confusion in understanding the process of listening can be alleviated by adopting an information processing approach to listening. A model is presented and listening strategies are discussed.
This research reports the results of a survey administered to the training directors of 250 randomly selected Fortune 500 companies. The results indicate that the training directors perceived inadequate listening skills and lack of listening training in the “typical”; organization member. Data reveal perceptions of the relationship between listening and performance, causes of listening problems, and, most importantly, areas of concentration to be included in a listening component of potential communication training programs in organizations or in organizational communication curricula.
In 1979 the State of Massachusetts identified eleven listening and fourteen speaking skills as part of a program on basic skills in elementary and secondary schools. The authors contracted with the State Department of Education to recommend methods of assessing these skills. The article summarizes the process and includes the recommendations given to the state. As each state will be going through a similar process, it is hoped this article will assist others charged with the same responsibility.
Although many have argued that listening is particularly important in organizations, few studies have examined listening and listening skills in this context. This study ex amined relationships between listening, communication related abilities, employee level in an insurance company, and upward mobility. The results indicated significant positive relationships between listening and other social cognitive and communicative abilities. While findings suggested that nonsupervisors tended to possess better listen ing abilities than supervisors, there was some evidence that better listeners were in higher levels of the organization and were more upwardly mobile.
Listening is a vital management skill. To find out more about how managers' listening is perceived in an organizational context, researchers administered a questionnaire to 144 managers and 827 of their subordinates in 6 hospitality organizations. Managers were asked to rate 26 of their own listening behaviors using a 7-point scale. Subor dinates were asked to indicate their perceptions of their managers' listening behavior on each of the same 26 items. Profiles are presented of those managers who were per ceived as particularly "good" or particularly "poor" listeners according to the ratings given them by their subordinates. Characteristics of those employees who gave their managers the highest and lowest ratings are also described. This information con tributes to a better understanding of how managers' listening is perceived in organiza tional contexts.
This article presents the results of a content analysis of 10 current public-speaking textbooks to determine the nature and extent to which they teach listening in an integrated approach with public speaking as an oral activity. Lewis and Nichols (196516.
Lewis , T. R. and
Nichols , R. G. 1965. Speaking and listening: A guide to effective oral-aural communication, Dubuque, IA: W.C. Brown. View all references) predicted that listening would increasingly be taught especially in an integrated approach with speaking. Beyond the prediction, they established a template for the pedagogy that emphasized the oral modality. Their prediction has not proved accurate. Ample research illustrates the lack of listening instruction. The current study sought both to replicate these findings and to examine the emphasis on the oral modality as reflected in public-speaking texts. Six research questions asked about listening inclusion and concentration, differences in written and oral modalities, delivery, development via writing, discussion of the oral modality, and pedagogy. The results of this analysis confirmed that these texts do contain treatments of listening but with one exception, only to a slight degree. Listening was seldom integrated with the teaching of speech within these texts. Second, with two exceptions, the texts seldom developed instruction with an emphasis on speech as an oral activity. Overall, the texts failed to reflect the pedagogy for teaching the oral modality essential to listening instruction. The results are discussed in terms of the extent to which the texts advance the teaching of listening and speaking as an interdependent oral activity. The conclusions indicate that the pedagogy advanced through these texts focus too greatly on writing to appropriately advance an understanding of the oral aspects essential to listening education.
This study examined the most frequently encountered barriers that may affect listen ing effectiveness among business college students. A factor analysis indicated the presence of six listening barrier factors that concern students. In addition, the barrier "listen primarily for details or facts" was perceived to be the most frequently en countered barrier identifded by the students. The students' major or age had no bear ing on the level of frequency given to the barrier factors. However, two out of the six factors were significantly different based on the students'sex.
As a means of reinforcing the importance of critical listening, this study analyzes six speeches presented by President George W. Bush. These speeches provide an extended example of the use of a rhetorical technique, associational juxtaposition, in which President Bush gives the impression of a connection between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the 9/11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center by al-Qaeda when, in fact, no evidence or reasons existed to support such a connection. The paper concludes by discussing how Mr. Bush's use of associational juxtaposition underscores the need for effective critical listening.
Listening is a complex process. Teaching listening should reflect that complexity. This study examines areas necessary for a complete listening curriculum. It surveys colleges and universities offering listening courses to discover which areas were included in course curricula. Investigation of syllabi, and in-class exercises, and the results of telephone interviews reveals which areas a sample of course instructors consider to be of high, average and low importance. Results indicate that Relational Listening, Commitment to Listening, Setting a Goal to Listen, Practicing Skills, Comprehensive and Critical Listening, Listening as Part of the Communication Process, Attention to Nonverbal Cues, the Psychological Aspect of Listening, Classroom Listening and Note-Taking were of importance. The physiological process, gender differences, and aesthetic listening generally received the least amount of coverage in the sample studied. This report discusses each area and the survey, draws conclusions, and makes recommendations regarding research and listening pedagogy.
Listening is a fundamental language skill, but it is often ignored by foreign and second language teachers. This article explains the complexity and importance of the listening skill, summarizes research on L2 listening, and provides a research-based consumer's guide to selecting and using L2 listening activities.
This chapter presents an integrative listening model designed by a collaborative team of educators at Alverno College. The authors introduce a unique and practical framework for listening across the curriculum. They explain the components of the Integrative Listening Model (ILM), illustrate the stages in the listening process itself, and provide samples of how listening can be incorporated into classroom activities, assignments and assessments in various disciplines. In a systematic and comprehensive way, the ILM framework presents concrete strategies for developing one's own listening ability. It also stresses contextual and personal filters that impact listening behaviors, as well as self assessment and goal-setting, to promote ongoing listening development. The ILM reflects the authors' beliefs that listening is far more than just hearing and that genuinely effective listening requires commitment, understanding, and practice. It addresses psychological, emotional and cognitive factors that influence human communication and offers a promise of life-long benefits.
The Common Core State Standards and a Response to Intervention framework are movements sweeping the nation. Speech-language pathologists are uniquely positioned to play a pivotal role in supporting successful implementation of these movements. This article explores the assessment tools speech-language pathologists SLPs will need to identify and progress monitor critical language/literacy skills such as listening comprehension and oral narratives skills. Foundational research demonstrates that communication units, total words spoken, and major story components are measures that will discriminate between students with adequate language skills and language disorders and are curriculum-based, sensitive to change, and useful to determine the effectiveness of language/literacy interventions. Speech-language pathologist can broaden the impact of their knowledge and skills to improve outcomes for all students.
Running title: Structure of discourse. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-93) Support ... by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense ... monitored by ONR under contract no. N00014-85-C-0079 "Spons agency ... National Inst. of Education. Funding also provided by the System Development Foundation. Contract 400-81-0030"--Doc. resume.
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