Listening Treatment in the Basic Communication Course Text

Numerous studies have indicated that listening is instrumental for academic and professional success, and most students receive listening instruction only in the basic communication course. This study analyzed the treatment of listening in the 17 most widely used basic communication course textbooks. The majority of the textbooks did devote at least one chapter to listening; however, the treatment was generally light, atheoretical, and lacked substantive listening scholarship

Eavesdropping as Listening Development

In ordinary life we are constantly imbued by listening, and we seem to interact in different contextual dimensions of culture and society (Adelmann, 2002; Linell, 1998), both verbally and nonverbally. “Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue,” according to the Russian scholar Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1984, p. 293). In everyday life we get used to many kinds of situations where we hear conversations that we are actually not supposed to hear. For example, while we are waiting for the bus or subway we may listen to people next to us who appear to being having an argument. Usually we do not notice all these routine situations. But sometimes we do notice someinteraction and listen with some attention. We have more of an absentminded attention and rarely listen attentively, but what if we did? The activity in listening presented here takes advantage of our daily and personal listening experiences of eavesdropping and use it for the educational purpose of listening development