What does a listening instructor do when he realizes that he can’t listen?
The choice I made was to find out why and then teach others, including those who teach listening, why some people can’t listen.
– I’ve always been passionate about listening – both as a practitioner and instructor – and often wondered why some people just couldn’t listen effectively. As a focus group leader I wondered why management couldn’t listen and process the complaints and criticisms often lobbed at them by their customers and employees. As a teacher I often wondered why some students ‘got it’ while others didn’t. Was it solely a lack of interest or attention on their part? Was it my teaching or speaking style? Or was it that they couldn’t listen effectively for no fault of their own.
After a number of years of denying my own hearing deficit it became undeniable. I could hear people talking, but in many instances I couldn’t understand what was being said. This led to an in-depth study into hearing loss, and then auditory processing disorders, and then speech understandability. One rabbit hole connected to another and it hasn’t stopped yet. It congealed as a study into Listening Disorders.
To fully understand how these disorders affect our ability to hear – listen – and understand, I needed to develop a model of the various physical and cognitive processes that enables our ability to communicate and make sense of the various sounds around us. The model has been evolving over the years and has led me to define listening as a series of complex processes that, working together, provides us with understanding, socialization, entertainment, analytical information and a degree of safety.
Listening disorders can then be defined as a physical, cognitive, psychological, or external condition that interferes with one of more of the normal processes of listening.
I hope that my continued study, along with writings and presentations, will offer those interested in the field of communications – especially the listening side of communications – with a framework to begin to understand why some people, as much as they try, simply cannot listen effectively.
Thank you for your interest in Listening Disorders.
Alan R. Ehrlich,
Chair, Listening Disorders Division, Global Listening Centre
Past President, Global Listening Centre (www.globallisteningcentre.org)
Past President, International Listening Association (www.listen.org)