Listening: Attitudes, Principles, and Skills

LISTENING: ATTITUDES, PRINCIPLES, AND SKILLS is a textbook about listening. We spend more time listening than we do reading, writing, and speaking combined. Yet, most people have no idea what listening is composed of. Our lives and the world in general would be a much better place if everyone took the time to improve their listening skills. This book takes an indepth look at the HURIER model of listening. Though several models of listening have been developed over the years, the HURIER model is, in my opinion, the model that best describes all of the processes involved in listening. There are six components to the HURIER model: Hearing, Understanding, Evaluating, Interpreting, Remembering, and Responding. LISTENING: A.P.S. is divided into 10 chapters and six of those chapters are spent solely on one component of the HURIER model. This book is quite informative about the art of listening. However, like the majority of college textbooks it is written in a very dry style. There is no glossary or side definitions of important words and the most important concepts are somewhat difficult to find in the layers of dull text. I found the most interesting reading in the book to be the case stories at the beginning of each chapter. There's no place quite like Burger World. Nevertheless, though the book is difficult to plough through, it is full of lots of useful information. It is a good text to use in a listening class. Just don't fall asleep reading it.