Page 151 - Between One and Many The Art and Science of Public Speaking

118 Part 2 Between Audience and Speaker

Exhibit 5.2 Goals of Listening

Type Goal Example

Listening to understand To recognize meaning Listening to a lecture on
based on auditory and Einstein’s theory of relativity
visual cues and to
comprehend meaning
Appreciative listening To experience stimulation Listening to a speech to
and enjoyment entertain
Empathic listening Understand and relate to origins of Listening to persuasive appeal
speaker’s thoughts and feelings for stem cell research from a
speaker whose health is at risk
Listening to provide feedback Identifying content and behaviors to Listening for clear statement of
facilitate improvement purpose

Complementary visual stimuli, such as facial expression, gesture, and move-
ment, become part of meaning for us, as does touch. The careful listener is sen-
sitive to both the verbal and the nonverbal nuances of messages. This is espe-
cially true for public speaking. Listeners in the audience need to look beyond
just the words of a speaker’s message. By the same token, speakers need to listen
to the entire message received from the audience. This means they should listen
not only for aural feedback but for feedback from other sources as well. These
sources include the expressions on audience members’ faces, their body orienta-
tion, and head movements such as nodding in agreement.
Once you have discriminated among various sounds and sights, the next
step to understanding is making sense of the aural and visual stimuli received. 12
Successful listening to understand demands that the meaning you assign to a
message closely approximates that of the source of the message. How well you
understand depends on several factors. Chief among them are vocabulary, con-
centration, and memory. 13

Vocabulary

Obviously, you cannot comprehend something for which you don’t have mean-
ing. Thus a limited vocabulary has the undesirable effect of limiting your abil-
ity to understand messages. In fact, failure to master the necessary vocabulary
can be embarrassing or worse. For example, both authors of this text were high
school debaters. One of us recalls a particularly embarrassing incident that re-
sulted from not knowing the meaning of the word superfl uous. Unaware that the
other team’s plan to remove all “superfl uous United States tariffs” meant that
they would remove only the unnecessary ones, the author’s team produced sev-
eral examples of tariffs that were essential to American industries. During cross-
examination, an opposing team member asked the author, “Do you know what
superfl uous means?” Of course, the author did not know. When the opposition
pointed out that every tariff the author’s team had cited was, by defi nition, not
superfl uous, and that only superfluous tariffs would be removed, the debate was,

for all practical purposes, lost. Needless to say, a dictionary became standard
material for all future debates.