What do you think?
Rate this book
Listening: Processes, Functions, and Competency
Listening: Processes, Functions, and Competency, Second Edition explores the role of listening as an essential element in human communication. The book addresses listening as a cognitive process, as a social function, and as a critical professional competency. Blending theory with practical application, Listening builds knowledge, insight, and skill to help the reader achieve the desired outcome of effective listening. This second edition introduces listening as a goal-directed activity and has been expanded to include a new chapter addressing listening in mediated contexts. Theory and research throughout the text have been updated, and the final chapter covers new research methodologies and contexts, including fMRI, aural architecture, and music.
358 pages, ebook
First published March 28, 2010
6 people are currently reading
13 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 16, 2020
Complete book for Listening Skills
Read
April 14, 2018A textbook about listening. I found it both useful and exasperating. It clearly and thoroughly presents current scholarly understandings of listening at a variety of levels, in a way that at least to my lay person's eyes seems to be effectively grounded in current research. Encountering some of these scholarly understandings was exactly why I read the book, so in that sense my mission was accomplished.
On the other hand, it *is* a text book, and therefore a lot of it is pretty boring – and I say this as someone who reads and enjoys plenty of scholarly books. As well, there were things about the writing and the approach that I didn't always like. For instance, one device used by the authors is a running series of callout boxes presenting case studies featuring an imagined group of students taking a course about listening. I appreciate the device in principle, and I agree that it did effectively highlite key ideas, but the dialogue from the imaginary students often felt artificial and forced, to the point of distracting from the content. Along with presenting a review of scholarly understandings of listening, the book also gives regular advice to readers about how to become better listeners themselves, which sometimes felt effective but sometimes felt a bit condescending. There's also something weird any time you read scholarly accounts of the human experience at the level of everyday life, or at least there is for me – I understand the value of having rigorously investigated ways of naming and categorizing how everyday life works, but I am always wary of the ways in which such work, especially when deployed incautiously, can reify experience and actually interfere with our ability to understand and exert agency over our lives even while giving an impression to the contrary.
I also had some reservations about the book's engagement with questions of mediated listening, i.e. how listening is changes thanks to the ubiquity of technology-mediated communication. I mean, it wasn't bad, and for the most part I appreciated that it was very careful and evidence-based – definitely an improvement over the alarmist nonsense that older folks sometimes circulate about the impacts of screens and social media, while still recognizing that there seem to be some significant potential downsides that we are still in the early stages of understanding. But I think it matters that nothing in its discussion of the topic really conveyed the feel of what I've heard from some people young enough to have grown up surrounded by smart phones and social media, particularly some marginalized young people, about how powerfully nourishing and connecting it can be – how literally "life saving" internet-mediated sociality can be, to quote a young queer nonbinary person whom I interviewed just last month, just to give one example.
My biggest concern with the book was completely unsurprising to me: it's lack of engagement with questions of power. It did talk about things like gender and cultural difference, some of which was quite useful, and certainly it was very up front about how prejudice can shape how we listen in a given situation, but it didn't work from an understanding of the social world that foregrounds socially organized differences in power. This was particularly stark in the chapters on listening in organizations, meaning mainly workplaces, and listening in the justice system – there was one passing reference to a union in a short paragraph on workplace conflict in the former, but other than that little recognition of the ways in which power permeates how most workplaces function and inevitably how listening happens there, and no recognition at all in the latter of the starkly anti-Black (and anti-Indigenous) character of police and courts and how that might be relevant to a conversation about listening in the latter.
So. It was very useful to me to read it and I learned a lot, but probably not a book for you unless you have a similarly specialized need to get a sense of some of the current core scholarship related to listening.
On the other hand, it *is* a text book, and therefore a lot of it is pretty boring – and I say this as someone who reads and enjoys plenty of scholarly books. As well, there were things about the writing and the approach that I didn't always like. For instance, one device used by the authors is a running series of callout boxes presenting case studies featuring an imagined group of students taking a course about listening. I appreciate the device in principle, and I agree that it did effectively highlite key ideas, but the dialogue from the imaginary students often felt artificial and forced, to the point of distracting from the content. Along with presenting a review of scholarly understandings of listening, the book also gives regular advice to readers about how to become better listeners themselves, which sometimes felt effective but sometimes felt a bit condescending. There's also something weird any time you read scholarly accounts of the human experience at the level of everyday life, or at least there is for me – I understand the value of having rigorously investigated ways of naming and categorizing how everyday life works, but I am always wary of the ways in which such work, especially when deployed incautiously, can reify experience and actually interfere with our ability to understand and exert agency over our lives even while giving an impression to the contrary.
I also had some reservations about the book's engagement with questions of mediated listening, i.e. how listening is changes thanks to the ubiquity of technology-mediated communication. I mean, it wasn't bad, and for the most part I appreciated that it was very careful and evidence-based – definitely an improvement over the alarmist nonsense that older folks sometimes circulate about the impacts of screens and social media, while still recognizing that there seem to be some significant potential downsides that we are still in the early stages of understanding. But I think it matters that nothing in its discussion of the topic really conveyed the feel of what I've heard from some people young enough to have grown up surrounded by smart phones and social media, particularly some marginalized young people, about how powerfully nourishing and connecting it can be – how literally "life saving" internet-mediated sociality can be, to quote a young queer nonbinary person whom I interviewed just last month, just to give one example.
My biggest concern with the book was completely unsurprising to me: it's lack of engagement with questions of power. It did talk about things like gender and cultural difference, some of which was quite useful, and certainly it was very up front about how prejudice can shape how we listen in a given situation, but it didn't work from an understanding of the social world that foregrounds socially organized differences in power. This was particularly stark in the chapters on listening in organizations, meaning mainly workplaces, and listening in the justice system – there was one passing reference to a union in a short paragraph on workplace conflict in the former, but other than that little recognition of the ways in which power permeates how most workplaces function and inevitably how listening happens there, and no recognition at all in the latter of the starkly anti-Black (and anti-Indigenous) character of police and courts and how that might be relevant to a conversation about listening in the latter.
So. It was very useful to me to read it and I learned a lot, but probably not a book for you unless you have a similarly specialized need to get a sense of some of the current core scholarship related to listening.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews