Types of Listening

Gary Buck divided the type of listening into two types:[1]

1. Bottom-up, it seem like listening to directions from friend on how to get to his/her house. This kind of listening comprehension is achieved by dividing and decoding the sounds - bit by bit. The ability to separate the stream of speech into individual words becomes more important here, if we recognize, for example, the name of a street or instructions on how to take a particular bus.
2. Top-down listening, listening to a friend tell a story about a terrible vacation in Thailand during rainy season with a mutual friend. This kind of listening requires the use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of the message. Background knowledge consists of context.

H. Douglass Brown divided the type of listening into four types; intensive, responsive, selective, and extensive.[2]

a.       Intensive is listening for perception of the component (phonemes, words, intonation, discourse markers, etc) of a larger stretch of the language.

b.      Responsive is listening to a relatively short stretch of language ( a greeting, question, command, comprehension check, etc ) in order to make an equality short response.

c.       Selective is listening to the short monologs for several minutes in order to scan certain information (e.g. classroom direction for a teacher, TV, or radio news item, or story)

d.      Extensive is listening to develop a top-down, global understanding of long speech or conversation and it has comprehensive purposes. e. g. listening to get the main idea, making inference from all of part of listening.

Some types of listening above explain us that listening has the complex purposes which the form listening influenced the value for listener. However, it is the evidence that listening skill is much useful for many people. By listening people can enjoy the song or it may even inspire human mind. At the heart of the matter, everyone listening for any purpose, it can be for fun or anything that would help them.

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[1] Gary Buck, Assessing Listening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) p 2

[2] Ibid, p 120