Re: Week 9 - Question 1

1. Think of a recent situation in which you found listening difficult. Which one (or more) of the four phases presented the most difficulty for you? Why? How could this have been overcome?

In Harris and Sherblom’s text of listening, interpreting the message is one of the four phases presented the most difficulty for me. Harris and Sherblom say, “In hearing the message and choosing to pay attention, we accept the message into our memory system. Interpreting the message is the next step. Our goal in this should be to understand the other person’s meaning” (Harris/Sherblom 139). In the authors expressions, Harris and Sherblom illustrate the key steps of interpreting the message are attention, memory, understanding, and interpreting. In my point of view, these four steps seem like the interlocking of chains that each part should not be missing.

In the small group discussion, we should pay more attention to someone’s ideas. If the contents are too long, I suggest memorize the general ideas that may be very helpful for us to understanding the meaning. After the understanding of the meaning, we go to the last step is to interpret the message. I am a Chinese and speaking English is my second language at my own situation. When I have a small group discussion with the members, the understanding is a bit hard for me before interpreting. In order to overcome my difficulty, I try every effort to memorize all in English instead of converting to Chinese in my brain. After the long time practice, I have found interpreting the message has improved. In addition, I always watch the TV news, interviews, and some TV shopping networks that will be very helpful for me to input all messages in English as these programs would definitely not have any Chinese interpretation.