2. Literature Review
2.1 The definition of listening Traditionally, listening was viewed as a passive process, in which our ears were receivers into which information was poured, and all the listeners had to do was passively register the message. Today we recognize that listening is an ‘active’ process, and that good listeners are just as active when listening as speakers are when speaking. Active listening is also an interpretive process. Listening used to be thought of as the exact decoding of the message. In fact, listening involves subtle interpretation. This interpretive notion has long been recognized in reading, but it has taken a long time for it to be accepted in terms of listening. Its acceptance directly affects our notions of ‘correctness’—it requires an acknowledgement of the inherent variation in listeners’ comprehension of what they hear, and of the importance of context and non-linguistic variables in this interpretation. A representative definition of listening is propounded by Clark and Clark (1977: 43-44). They give both a narrow and broad definition: “Comprehension has two common senses. In its narrow sense it denotes the mental processes by which listeners take in the sounds uttered by a speaker and use them to construct an interpretation of what they think the speaker intended to convey... Comprehension in its broader sense, however, rarely ends here, for listeners normally put the interpretations they have built to work”.