Active Listening Strategies

If you experience hearing loss, the following active listening strategies will enhance your communication with other people to create a more positive communicative environment than hearing aids alone can provide.

• Look at the person who is speaking. Position yourself to get a full view of the face, not just a profile view. A lot of information can be obtained by watching as well as by listening. Although no one can gain all of the information by sight alone, everyone has some ability to speech read; that is, to obtain information on what is being said by watching a speaker's lips, facial expressions, gestures, body language, etc.
• Wear your glasses when indicated. They will help you to speech read.
• Sit with your better ear, if one is better than the other, toward the speaker.
• Reduce the distance between you and the person talking. The ideal distance is approximately three to five feet.
• Avoid carrying on conversations from another room.
• Concentrate on the thought or ideas that the speaker is expressing rather than straining to understand every word that is said. Don't get discouraged or give up if you miss a few words. Speech is commonly redundant and predictable.
• Try to be aware of the topic of conversation and environmental cues that may help you to make educated guesses. Friends can be coached to give occasional leads about the subject being discussed. They can unobtrusively say, "We are discussing the housing problem," or you might quietly ask someone in the group to tell you what they are discussing.
• Become familiar with the way different people express themselves such as facial expressions, vocabulary, sentence structure, accent or dialect, etc.
• Maintain an active interest in people and events. Knowledge about national and world affairs, as well as those of your community and friends, will help you to follow many discussions or conversations more readily.
• Don't be afraid that people will think you are staring at them while you are trying to understand what they are saying. It is always polite to look at the person who is talking.
• Don't bluff and nod as if you understand when you don't. It is better to ask questions than to continue along the wrong path.
• Don't hesitate to ask someone to clarify information you may have missed. In order to reduce frustration on both sides, it is helpful to be very specific about what you have missed so that the person does not have to repeat the whole message. You may also want to ask the person not just to repeat the information, but also to rephrase it so that words you have difficulty hearing can be replaced with words that are easier to hear.
• Tell the speaker specifically which part of what they've just said you did not understand. Merely saying, "I didn't hear," or "I didn't understand," doesn't give the speaker the necessary information to correct your problem. Tell them if they are speaking too softly, too rapidly, if their hand is in front of their mouth or if background noise is preventing you from understanding.
• Work at listening and do not get into the habit of allowing someone else, such as your spouse or friend, to listen for you.