It’s almost laughably simple: For the FBI, a ‘mirror’ is when you repeat the last three words (or the critical one to three words) of what someone just said… mirroring is the closest one gets to a Jedi mind trick.

– Chris Voss

There is empirical evidence showing a positive correlation between school children’s listening behaviour and arithmetic skills, language arts skills, work study skills as well as intelligence.

– Listening as a Lifelong Learning Skill – What, why, and How

The conceptual and programmatic framework for life skills education developed by UNICEF in 2017 for the Middle East and North America defines life skills as, “cognitive and non-cognitive, higher order, transversal and transferrable skills for learning, for employability, for personal empowerment, and for active citizenship”. If that was an eyeful and internal earful, life skills refer more generally to soft skills necessary for daily life.

The UNICEF framework had reference to 21st Century Competencies frameworks of various systems including Singapore and built on the UNICEF Global Evaluation of Life Skills Education Programmes, 2012 report. It highlights 12 core life skills which are, creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, cooperation, negotiation, decision making, self-management, resilience, communication, respect for diversity, empathy and participation.

The proposition that listening well is a core prerequisite to the attainment of the identified core life skills would find ready agreement and as such listening is itself a core and essential life skill.

It has been found that “more than forty percent of our daily communication is spent on listening, with thirty-five percent being dedicated to speaking” and “only nine percent … being occupied by reading” (Walker, 2014). Interestingly, for various reasons, despite its preponderance amongst communication skills, researchers are of the view that it remains the least researched, understood and hardest to teach.

For these reasons, listening is the Valyrian steel link, present only in a Maester’s chain, high levels attainable only with lifelong, deliberate practice. It is what master crisis and high stakes negotiators at the FBI and elsewhere swear by and it allows in the words of Marcus Aurelius to “enter into the ruling principle of your neighbour’s mind”.

Listening helps us to distinguish and zoom in on different types of sounds in the environment, understand and remember information, analyse and evaluate what we hear and experience what a speaker is going through (Deveci, 2018). It requires not mere hearing but active processing to render meaning of what is being conveyed with the aid of background, cultural and contextual knowledge.

Rizvi (2005) describes four stages of the listening process which comprise, focusing on certain sounds in a message, interpreting a message, evaluating the message and finally responding to the message. In this way, it is not unlike the reading process where students would have to choose which parts of a passage or sentence to place more weight on, understand meaning in context and then engage in deciding how to answer.

The British Psychological Society referred to a paper published in Psychosis which suggested that people hear an internal voice when reading silently. Regardless of whether this voice is audible internally, reading is not dissimilar to listening in that both comprise reception of sensory input albeit through different channels with the same end point in the mind’s eye where information is processed and displayed. To this extent, it may not be unreasonable to expect some overlap in strategies employed in both modes.

Unlike open-ended comprehension (OEC) exercises however, in listening comprehension tests, students do not have the benefit of re-hearing at will. In OEC passages, a student could re-read a relevant portion as many times as she needs to so that she is certain as to its meaning.

When reading oral passages, oftentimes, students might miss out and misread existing words or include non-existent words. Whilst in the context of oral exams, the above may have negligible consequence especially if such errors are few and far in between, consequences increase in severity in OEC passages when misreading a word might result in misunderstanding of a crucial point. The risk of such errors is compounded when experienced readers engage in speed reading.

Prepositional constructs and phrasal verbs are a case in point. ‘in the interests of’ means something entirely different from ‘to the interests of’. When a student suspects he has misread or misheard a word on which meaning turns, he usually does not have as much liberty to engage in rectification when it comes to oral or listening comprehension passages. Indeed, when such texts are over, “only a mental representation remains” (Vandergrift, 2004).

When it comes to daily interactions though, the spoken word is superior to its written equivalent even after taking into account the transient nature of the former. To further shared understanding in dialogue and for effective negotiations, participants in conversations have been advised to demonstrate empathy and one way to do so is to make speakers feel heard.

As a Harvard Business Review article explains, listening is not merely being silent or nodding to show empathy (which really is more felt than seen). It might be useful to include in the list of what not to do, to genuinely feel empathy as opposed to pulling off a Jedi mind trick, merely repeating what someone else says. Instead, summarising in different words and clarifying work better. Indeed, one advantage of conversation over written correspondence is that the former allows instant clarification from the horse’s mouth and students are allowed to clarify questions during stimulus-based conversations.

While students may not be able to seek clarification on a recorded script, there are several strategies available to enhance accuracy of listening. Such strategies include, Listening from the Middle (attributed to Mendelsohn), Dichtogloss, Discovery Learning (Walker, 2014) and Total Physical Response (Ulum, 2015).

The aforementioned strategies serve to increase ability to listen but do not address the willingness to do so. Just like how some participants in online discussions seek out only views which reinforce their existing world view leading to the formation of filter bubbles and echo chambers, listeners too engage in selective hearing. This may be because of common psychological phenomena such as confirmation bias or loss aversion because too much has been invested on a particular view of a matter or because it is a defence mechanism to counter hard-selling.

Sometimes selective hearing happens without intentional bias. For example, some words might be of peculiar import and laden with emotional significance. Such words when heard in an unrelated and innocent conversation have the potential to hijack attention and trigger involuntary trips down the back alleys of memory.

Though selective hearing has negative connotations, accurate listening like reading entails meticulous selection and students would do well to listen to everything and hear only the good stuff.

The Brain Dojo