More Than Just HearingEssay Preview: More Than Just HearingReport this essayMore than just HearingI believe in Dawn Rosenberg McKays article “Now Pay Attention” she expands on what we learned in chapter seven. In her article, McKay talks about why and how you need to listen well and the barriers to listening. The best thing that I got out of this article is the portion talking about how to listen well. I believe that everyone can take at least a little out of it to help them listen better. McKay states that to listen well you need to maintain eye contact, not interrupt the speaker, sit still, not your head, lean toward the speaker, repeat their instructions and ask appropriate questions when it is necessary. I can think of times just today where I could have used everyone of those things to make a conversation between myself and someone else better. But I can also think of times where I have gotten annoyed because someone I was talking to did or did not do one of things and it felt like they were ignoring me or only half listening.
McKay also list off barriers to listening that we all run into frequently. Mckay lists the barriers as bias or prejudice to either the speaker or what they are saying, language differences or accents that make it hard to understand the speaker, noise around you and the speaker, worry, fear or anger, and the lack of attention span from the listener. None of these barriers come as a surprise to me but I think now that they have been listed down and I have paid attention to them that I might pay more attention to them as I am talking to people.
Becoming a better listener is something I really wanted to take out of this class. I would not have rated myself a very good listener because I used to like to be heard before I wanted to listen to anything that anyone had to say. I still would not rate myself as a great listener but the thing is that I am learning and it takes time. If I think that I messed up in a conversation listening to someone then it bugs me and later on I sit down and think about what I could have done differently to have made it turn out differently. From there I try to take that and apply it to my other conversations. I think that this chapter has been the most helpful to myself so far. Mckays article can be found at the link provided here (
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<From the first page, I was impressed with the way you responded to questions and replies. There were a lot of questions, you could tell from the way you responded. As you mentioned, the topic of conversation was a big topic for me and I was very motivated about what I wanted to do so I can ask people a lot of questions and I really hope that this class will answer such questions as if I was just getting started. For example, the last question was very well handled by the instructor. He even asked if we were looking into looking into writing. His point was that just because a person is very focused on questions doesn’t mean they’re not capable of answering other people’s questions. For me what this example would be about is, ‘I want to improve in my language and in my life’. I mean it’s such a big and important subject that really isn’t really addressed in this course.
The class provided excellent help with the topic of this class which really is about being a better listener. You provide a lot of questions with very specific questions that are easy to answer. For example, I wanted to start off with a new topic that I want to get used to and then give to people. I would say having someone give you information as to how to answer a question could be helpful and would make it easy for you as a new listener to move on. I didn’t give it all to you as you said but instead you were making assumptions that maybe I was not paying attention. The first section actually provided very specific information. The question is, ‘if I’m just starting out with a new language and I want to apply it to things like writing, I would say I’m not sure yet whether I can talk about that right now’. It was quite useful to get a clear idea of what you were asking me and where you were coming from. However, at the end you didn’t have to do everything from there. You could just sort of ask questions in a more appropriate way to explain what you were really asking and there would be no confusion. When you were listening that gave out as good suggestions on how to help you move forward. I also really enjoyed having your help to help people that were not familiar with the topic. The class is really quite long and I didn’t really expect to take my time and was very busy answering your questions but as you mentioned, that took your time. I really look forward to learning more about the class!
I really like how your answers were to questions that I thought it would be important for a new listener to respond. Each example I gave you gives you an idea of how you handled your questions and could help you get ready to respond better. The class contains a lot of practical advice which I