How Does Listening Affect Oral Communication

Communication occurs when a sender expresses an emotion or a feeling, creates an idea, or senses the need to communicate. Factors that affect the success of oral communication include the environment in which communication is attempted and the characteristics of both the speaker and listener. The willingness of both parties to unite these factors can greatly improve the effectiveness of communication. The importance of listening in communication is enormous. People often focus on their speaking ability believing that good speaking equals good communication but without proper listening, communication does not occur. Effective listening is active participation in a conversation which helps the speaker becomes understood. Without active participation between the listener and the speaker, the speaker would sometimes get easily misunderstood. People who are successful communicators take responsibility for being certain that you understand what they are saying by speaking in simple, grammatical, and understandable terms. They also give examples, ask for feedback, put what they said previously in different words, and try to make it easy for you to gain the true intent of their communications. However, the listener must hear and not assume what is said. The listener can easily get distracted by the speaker’s mannerisms, accent, dress or grooming, language style, or delivery of the message if the listener does learn to tune them out. These factors listed above are a major affect of oral communication because the listener attention is focus elsewhere other than the message the speaker trying to make understood. If the listener let these distraction draw them away from the speaker message it would be very hard for them to give any type of feedback because they were not listening. It is very embarrassing for the listener to be asked to give feedback on the speaker message and they do not respond or comes up with something totally different because he or she wasn’t paying