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So I'm in the earliest stages of brewing up two research projects in the area of listening. I'm describing them here in case former students of mine are interested, and especially in case you have insights or realizations to share.

Project #1

This one occurred to me in August, and I did a little scut work toward submitting to IRB, but I got sidetracked with this little thing called fall semester. This study would unfold in two parts.

First, I would create a survey that would ask participants to think about a very powerful, eloquent, persuasive speaker, and then think about a very sharp, incisive, powerful listener. Once they had the image of each clear in their minds, they would be asked which person would be better equipped to achieve each outcome from a list. The list would include things like win an election, graciously accept an award, give a best friend's toast at a wedding, form a close relationship, help someone overcome an emotional problem, etc. Scattered through the outcomes would be ones tied very precisely to persuasion and winning arguments. One item might well be, "Win an argument." Others might be things like "Change someone's mind on a politically controversial topic," or "Persuade a jury to find in favor of a client," or "Sell a used car." I would find a way to disseminate that survey to a large, very representative sample, with lots of demographics represented. My working hypothesis is that people from every background will disproportionately expect that the speaker is better equipped to persuade, and to win arguments, than the listener is.

Second, I would prepare a shorter survey for debate judges to complete immediately after a debate. It would have just four items: 

1. How close was the debate you just judged?

• Very close
• Somewhat close
• Not close

2. Was one or both of the winning debaters a more effective speaker than both of the losing debaters?

• Much more effective
• More effective
• Neutral
• Both winning debaters were less effective speakers
• Both winning debaters were much less effective speakers

3. Was one or both of the winning debaters a more effective listener than both of the losing debaters?

• Much more effective
• More effective
• Neutral
• Both winning debaters were less effective listeners
• Both winning debaters were much less effective listeners
• Don’t know.

4. Pick the most accurate statement from below:

• Effective listening had more to do with the outcome of this debate than effective speaking did.
• Effective speaking had more to do with the outcome of this debate than effective listening did.
• Effective listening and effective speaking had identical or very similar effects on the outcome of this debate.
• Don’t know.

And here are my hypotheses.

H1: After debates that a judge describes as close, the judge will more often describe the winning team as better listeners than as better speakers.
H2: After debates that a judge describes as close, the judge will report that listening skill had more to do with the outcome than speaking skill did.

If my hypotheses are supported, the study will establish that in practice, apparent listening skill makes more of a difference in persuasive and argumentative settings than speaking does. Now, some might object that I'm basing the conclusion on the judge's perception of each participant's listening skill, not anything measurable. But my answer would be that in a debate setting, the judge creates the winner by awarding the win, so if it's the judge's perception that listening made more of a difference, then that is a fact, because the judge's perceptions were the substance from which the win was constructed. I'd also argue that debate judges draw extensively from training and experience to make very detailed judgments of why each team either won or lost the debate, so I think this is actually one of the best in situ research designs for this question. A third shadow working hypothesis is that just about no judges will choose the "Don't know" options for the last two items, because I expect that when prompted, they'll actually have very strong opinions about both sides' listening effectiveness, but that might prove not to be the case.

On a logistical note, a common practice at college debate tournaments nowadays is for all the judge feedback to happen online, through a central web-based app. I have enough good friends left in the college debate world that I think I could get them to put a link to this survey right above where judges had to go to fill in their decision. And I'm thinking of rummaging around foundations that deal with civic engagement and seeing if I can't get a small grant for this. I'm a lot more likely to get lots of judges to take part if I can do a weekly drawing for a gift something-or-other to someplace. I'm also thinking of offering this to students in Listening Behavior as an honors contract: they can collaborate with me on the study, and if they make a sufficient contribution, I'll list them as co-authors when I submit it.

So, that's one project. Here's the other.

Project #2

Four or five years ago, I got an idea one morning while I was brushing my teeth, and a few months later I had a theory piece in International Journal of Listening about Performative Listening. In particular, I remember running the idea past Peter and Fromm on the way home from a tournament, and they gave me some helpful suggestions, which is why they're both listed in the acknowledgments. Now, I have another idea.

This morning, for no particular reason, it struck me that critical listening has a complement: persuasive speech. Comprehensive listening has a complement, too: a spoken lesson. Appreciative listening's complement is any sort of audible performance, empathetic listening is any sort of self-disclosure, and discriminative listening's complement is any sort of meaningful sound. In most of those cases, what I'm identifying is what would hit the bullseye as the paradigm case of speech suited to that listening function: people sometimes listen comprehensively to something that's only loosely a lesson, or they listen appreciatively to something not really designed to be aesthetically pleasing. But the exercise of thinking about their complement does pin down something about the listening functions, and something potentially very important.

The problem is, there are a lot more modes of speaking, or communicating audibly, that are not covered by the above list of communicative modes. Argument is not the same as persuasion, so what can we say about listening for argument? Corporate worship is not the same as performance, so what can we say about listening for worship or devotional activity? It's not critical, appreciative or comprehensive, precisely; it's participatory in a way the other listening functions don't quite capture.

My initial impression, which I'm not entirely confident is correct, is that it's a problem with breaking listening into discrete constructs. It feels to me as though there ought to be a spectrum. Crude instruction strategies in effective speaking very often turn back to the topos-based strategy in Aristotle's rhetoric: a list of kinds of things to say in specific circumstances. But that approach is shot through with serious limitations. Far better is an approach that treats the best speaking as that which is finely tuned to audience and circumstance. I think what I want to propose is that listening isn't divisible into discrete functions, but its purpose can be aligned along certain dimensions, and that listener and speaker experience the encounter differently, in effectiveness and satisfaction, based on the effectiveness of their tuning to one another. 

Now, naturally, people speak for more than one purpose at once, and listen under more than one function at once, and a speaker teaching a lesson might encounter a listener more prepared to be critical. But that could also be part of the theory: where the speaking and listening functions weren't tuned, then that would be a different type of communicative encounter with different outcomes.

Anyway, preliminary thoughts. Might wind up as another theory piece.