 Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. Assalamu alaikum. Today we are going to talk about listening skills. Listening is the ability to pay attention to and effectively interpret what other people are saying. It is not just hearing the words that are being said to you rather than give comprehending the meaning and their context and trying to understand the underlying intentions and emotions. So, we can see that listening is an act that involves complex, cognitive, effective and behavioral processes. Cognitive process is like understanding and interpreting the message. Effective process is like being motivated to pay attention and the behavioral process is like providing a feedback either through verbal or non-verbal channel. Now, we are going to see that there is a basic communication profile as we all know that there are four language skills, listening, speaking, reading and writing. In order to learn these skills, listening comes at first and similar is the case that we use this skill most of the time, but if we can see that the time we spend on teaching these skills, we spend more time on teaching writing as comparative to listening. Now we are going to see stages of listening process. There are six stages of listening process. The first one is hearing and receiving. At this stage, the listener receives the message and acknowledges it. Then comes the second stage which is decoding the message. At this stage, listeners dissects the message and give meaning to the sounds according to his perceptions, beliefs and views. Then comes the third stage which is comprehension. At this stage, what listeners do is that they understand the meaning of the message. The fourth stage is remembering. Even before acting out on the information, we need to process the information. It is like recalling and retaining the information into the memory. Then comes the fifth stage which is evaluation. Once the message is being stored in the memory, the listener is going to evaluate the message which means he is going to assess and judge by applying critical thinking skills. The last stage is responding. At this stage, the listener needs to respond. If you are in a one-on-one conversation or a communication like in a group talk or in a dialogue, you can respond through verbal channel. But if you are in a lecture theatre hall where are multiple people around you, then the immediate response can be given through nodding your head or you can clap and you can maintain eye contact. There are few misconceptions about listening. The first one is that people normally believe that listening and hearing are same things. But they are not. These are two different things because listening is an active process in which a listener is actively involved. He receives the message, he understands it, he evaluates it and then responds. But on the other hand, hearing is just like receiving the information and not retaining it and not providing a feedback on it. Other than this, there is also one misconception that we believe that all good speakers are good listeners as well. Which is not true because we also know that in order to become a good speaker, you have to be a good listener. But it is not the case that all good speakers are good listeners. And there is another misconception that smarter and intelligent people are good listeners. There are some problems that can occur during the listening process. Sometimes we are more concerned about what we are going to say rather than paying attention to what is being said to us. And sometimes we are more concerned about the part of information that is more related to us. So we skip the information that is not much relevant. And sometimes we are attention deficient, which means we are not paying attention. We are preoccupied or our mind is diverted. So we are not listening properly and not getting the message. Now we will see that there are various listening types. The first one is informative listening. The goal of this type of listening is to comprehend and retain the information. Then comes the second type which is active listening, which is the most important type of listening. Because in this type of listening, listener is actively involved. And it is also known as critical listening because a listener has to critically evaluate the message on multiple levels. Then comes the third type which is content listening. In this type of listening, we try to understand and evaluate the meaning of the message. Then we have empathetic listening. The goal of this type of listening is to understand the feelings and the views of the speaker. Then we have discriminative listening in which the listener is more concerned about specific sound and nuances rather than paying attention to the meaning of the words. And at the last we have appreciative listening in which listener seeks to appreciate the message which is more relevant and more concerned to his needs and wants. Okay, there are six listening skills that a listener needs to pay attention to. The first thing is that as a listener, what you need to do is to pay attention to what is being said to you and you try to avoid judgments. And after this, once you receive the message, try to reflect upon it, try to understand the meaning. And if there is some misconception and if there is some unclearity, it is better to clarify it by asking questions. Once you have all the message received, try to summarize it, try to get the main idea. And once the message is received, try to share it further. Now, we are going to see that there are various barriers to listening. Barriers are like hindrances that can affect the listening process. The first one is environmental barrier. In this kind of a barrier, what we can say is that sometimes technical faults can happen. Maybe the mic is not working properly. Maybe you are sitting far away from the stage or the people who are sitting around you, they are talking so much or they are background noises. So all these factors can affect the listening process. Apart from environmental barriers, we have psychological barriers and it is at the end of the listener. Sometimes listener is feeling anxious or stressful or there is something that is going on in his mind. So they are not in the right state of mind and they do not pay attention to what is being said. And there are physiological barriers that again comes at the end of a listener. Maybe you are not physically feeling well, there is headache. So you are not in that physically capable to understand what the message is about. Apart from these, we also have other barriers like selective listening, negative attitude or poor motivation. Selective listening is that in which the listener is more concerned about listening the content that is more relevant to them and they are paying attention to only that information which is related to them. Then comes the negative attitude in which we are more concerned about hearing what is not being said and poor motivation is that listener is not motivated enough to pay attention. And in this in this barrier what happens that the message is being lost. There are few steps that you can do in order to avoid all these barriers. The first one is try to control if it is an environmental barrier, you can control it by reducing the background noises and if you are a listener what you can do, you can practice to pay attention to listen properly rather than concentrating on what you are going to say. You can ask questions if there is some unclarity or ambiguity. Other than this what else you can do is try to pay attention to what the speaker is saying, try to avoid selective listening, try to avoid judgments and you need to be more focused in order to understand the message. So in order to conclude this topic I will give you some properties of a good listener. The first thing the characteristic of a good listener is that they are always active. They are actively participating in the process, they pay attention, they are more focused and they pay attention to what the speaker is saying and they are always keen to learn and other than this they always give you nonverbal cues like nodding their head, keeping eye contact. Apart from this if they have any questions they save it till the end and they are more focused on speaker's message and they are always keen to learn.