PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION_NOTES

LISTENING & SOUNDS OF ENGLISH

 LISTENING_STEPS
DEFINITION: Listening is a communication process which involves reception, decoding and
interpretation of, as well as response to, verbal messages. It is an essential management and
leadership skill.

Steps of Listening:
1. Receiving: This is getting the message, both what is being spoken, and what is left
unspoken, including verbal omissions and non-verbal cues.
2. Understanding: This is processing the message and extracting meaning from it.
3. Remembering: This is the transferring of the key points/ main argument of the understood
message from short-term memory to long-term memory.
4. Evaluating: This is the consideration and judgment stage where one needs to distinguish
truth from lies, and identify own biases so that they might not influence one’s opinion.
5. Responding: This is NOT just repetition, but providing feedback. This is a confirmation that
the listener has received the message, and that both parties have understood the message.
 LISTENING & HEARING
LISTENING HEARING

• Learnt skill • Inborn ability

• Conscious effort for interpretive
action
• Active and psychological process
• Requires concentration and can
be controlled
• Secondary and temporary/
fragmented process
• Effortless perception of sound for
receiving action
• Passive and physiological process
• Requires no concentration and
cannot be controlled
• Primary and continuous process
 POOR LISTENING
REASONS FOR POOR LISTENING:

1. Unavailable Training: People are formally trained since childhood in the major communicative skills of
writing, reading, speaking, but not listening.
2. Difference of Speed Between Thought & Speech: People can process 400-500 words per minute, which is
quicker than they are spoken i.e. 125 words per minute approximately. The leftover mental capacity (about
75%) makes people inattentive.
3. Inefficiency in Listening: People retain 50% of a 10-minute lecture, which drops to a final level of 25% after
48 hours.
4. Low Concentration: This may be the result of psychological or physical situations such as visual or auditory
distractions, physical discomfort, inadequate volume, lack of interest, stress, or personal bias.
5. Poor Judgment: This is coming to hasty conclusions before listening to the complete speech, or
understanding the speaker’s viewpoint fully.
6. Confirmation Bias: This is the tendency to pick out aspects of a speech that support one’s own pre-existing
beliefs and values.
7. Lack of Prioritization: This is giving equal weight to important and unimportant parts of the speech, and
failing to retain the important points.
8. Vividness Effect: This is the tendency to be impressed by a speaker’s vivid descriptions or dramatic style of
speech, without focusing on the substance.
 LISTENING_TYPES
TYPES OF LISTENING:

1. Appreciative: This is listening for aesthetic pleasure e.g. listening to music, a comedian, an
entertainer.
2. Empathetic: This is listening for providing emotional and moral support to the speaker e.g.
listening done by nurses, doctors, lawyers, counselors.
3. Comprehensive: This is listening for understanding and interpreting the message e.g. students
listening to teacher, people listening to directions to a place.
4. Critical: This is listening for analyzing and judging an argument, also called Evaluative/
Judgmental/ Interpretive Listening e.g. judge listening to witness, buyer listening to salesperson.
5. Superficial: This is listening done to avoid offending the speaker, very like passive hearing e.g.
pretending to listen when forced to attend a lecture on a subject you are not interested in.
6. ‘You’ Viewpoint: This is listening similar to Empathetic Listening, by giving more importance to
the other person.
 LISTENING_BARRIERS
BARRIERS TO LISTENING:
1. Barrier of Content: Listeners think that they know (i) too much, and there is nothing else to learn, and (ii) too little, and they
tune out when faced with difficult intellectual/ emotional content.
2. Barrier of Speaker: Listeners focus too much on (i) the speaker’s accent, organization, clarity, speed, volume, tone, inflections,
emotions, and appearance, or (ii) their like/ dislike of the speaker, and miss the argument.
3. Barrier of Medium: Listeners need to put in the most effort when (i) speaking face-to-face as more visual and other stimuli are
present, less when (ii) the speaker is visible but not present, as on TV, and least when (iii) the speaker is not visible, as in
recorded music.
4. Barrier of Stimulus: Listeners are distracted by stimuli such as sound, light, smell, visual effects, mannerisms, voice inflections,
and moving objects, and mainly psychological stimuli.
5. Barrier of Mindset: Listeners may develop a positive or negative attitude towards the matter depending upon his/ her physical,
mental and emotional characteristics, which can distort the message.
6. Barrier of Language: Listeners may attach different/ ambiguous meaning to the words spoken, and misinterpret the message
based on personal bias.
7. Barrier of Speed: Listeners may process part of the message quickly, and tune out for the rest of the message.
8. Barrier of Feedback: Listeners may provide premature comment/ evaluation without fully understanding the speaker’s
viewpoint.
9. Barrier of Culture: Listeners may face problems in understanding and interpretation when faced with a person from a different
culture, due to choice of words, accents, pronunciation and other intangible reasons.
 SOUND & SPELLING
SOUNDS OF ENGLISH
• Phoneme: A phoneme is any one of the set of the smallest units of speech in a
language that distinguishes one word from another e.g. the phonemes in the
word ‘cat’ are /k/, /æ/, /t/.

• IPA: International Phonetic Alphabet

• Sound & Spelling Mismatch: One-to-one correspondence between phonemes

and letters of the alphabet does not exist e.g. the ‘oo’ sound in blue, shoe, flew,
through, you, two, too, gnu etc. each has the same sound but a different spelling.
 SOUND & SPELLING MISMATCH
MISMATCH WORDS WORDS

One letter can represent more than “s”ame, “s”ugar, mu“s”ic, vi“s”ion “ch”emistry, ma“ch”ine, atta“ch”
one phoneme (one at a time)

One phoneme can be represented “c”ar, “k”ite, o“cc”asion, “ch”emist “s”ing, “c”ity, “sc”ent, pre“ss”
by more than one individual letter
and/ or combination(s) of letter

Certain letters do not represent any min“e”, lis“t”en, “p”sychology, “h”our

sound

Sounds not hinted at the graphic /f/ sound in enou“gh” OR /f/ sound in li”eu”tenant
sign
 PROBLEM SOUNDS IN INDIA
PROBLEM SOUNDS:

Sounds of English that may be problematic for Indian language-users:

1. Sound represented by ‘f’ and ‘ph’ as in ‘folly’ and ‘telephone’.
2. Sound represented by ‘v’ as in ‘Victoria’.
3. Sound/s represented by ‘th’ as in ‘thin’ and ‘brother’.
4. Sound represented by ‘z’ as in ‘zoo’.
5. Sound represented by ‘s’ as in ‘vision’.

• Most Indian languages do not have the problem sounds listed above e.g. ‘vest’ > pronounced as ‘west’, ‘only’ > ‘wonly’,
‘thin’ > ‘tin’, ‘zoo’ > ‘joo’, ‘vision’ > ‘visson’ or ‘vijon’.
• Several Indian languages have words ending with a vowel sound e.g. Odiya, Bengali, Dravidian languages. Speakers of
these languages tend to add vowel sounds to English words e.g. ‘scheme’ > ‘scheme-uh’.
• Some Indian languages rarely have consonant clusters at the beginning/ end of words. Speakers of these languages
insert a vowel sound when consonant clusters occur in English words e.g. ‘school’ >‘iskool’, ‘candle’ > ‘kandel’, ‘uncle’ >
‘unkel’.
• Most Indian languages have long, open vowels. Speakers of these languages find it difficult to pronounce the long, closed
vowels of English like ‘date’>‘det’, ‘court’>‘kort’, ‘bird’>‘bud’, and shorten the vowels instead.
• Similarly, short, closed vowels are pronounced as long, open vowels e.g. ‘pen’>‘pan’, ‘bed’>‘bad’, ‘bud’>’baad’, ‘hurt’>‘hart’.
 MOTHER TONGUE INFLUENCE

• MTI or Mother Tongue Influence: This is the influence of the sounds of a person’s
birth language or mother tongue upon a different or foreign language that s/he
is trying to learn, and how the former affects the latter.
• The most common reason for this influence is transfer or interference from the
mother tongue.
• Generally, errors made in pronunciation are due to difference in the sound
system and spelling symbols between the mother tongue and English.
• Sound system of the mother tongue of the learners inhibits the acquisition of the
pronunciation and sound system of the second language.
• E.g. school > ‘iskool’, biscuit > ‘biskoot’ etc.