Week 2 — Read the Room: Listen, Profile, Adapt — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 2 of the term — read an audience through three lenses, trace where your own listening breaks, and explain to a friend why one speech does not fit every room.

This week you learned that hearing is not listening, that the listening process runs from receiving to remembering, that six barriers get in the way of listening, and that audience analysis reads a room through three lenses and ends in adaptation. In this assignment you work four short problems on the week's models, explain each one, profile an audience you will really face, trace a moment when your own listening broke down, and explain audience analysis to someone who has never taken a speaking course. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Speech Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles.

The task

This week's shared example is the first-year seminar audience, and it is illustrative and attributed to no one. A student gives an informative speech on food waste in a campus dining hall to a first-year seminar of about 30 students who all eat in that dining hall. The seminar is required, so the audience is captive, and the speech slot is 5 minutes. The running speech's audience profile reads that seminar through the demographic, psychographic, and situational lenses, with one finding and one adaptation for each:

• demographic: first-year students, most new to campus, from a mix of majors, all eating in that dining hall; adaptation: build examples from the dish-return window they pass every day
• psychographic: most have likely never asked where the food goes, and some may hear "food waste" as blame; adaptation: define "plate waste" in one plain sentence and explain with no scolding
• situational: about 30 listeners in a classroom, captive, a five-minute slot; adaptation: open with a sight from their own lunch, keep to three main ideas, and speak to the back row

Chapter 2 walks through the profile, the five stages of the listening process (receiving, attending, understanding, responding, remembering), and the six barriers to listening (physical noise, psychological noise, semantic noise, information overload, pseudolistening, prejudging).

Work these four problems, and show how you reached each one:

1. The running speech's audience profile reads the first-year seminar through 3 lenses, and each lens gets 1 finding and 1 adaptation. How many filled cells does the complete profile have?
2. The listening process has 5 stages, and hearing covers only 1 of them. How many stages are choices the listener makes?
3. This week adds 3 new barriers to listening (information overload, pseudolistening, prejudging) and 4 active-listening habits (focus, withhold judgment, paraphrase, take lean notes). How many new barrier and habit names is that in all?
4. Week 1 sorted noise into 4 kinds, and 3 of those kinds appear on this week's list of barriers to listening. How many kinds of noise are not on the list?

Beside each answer, add one brief explanation, and use your own audience and your own listening for the parts that ask for it:

• Problem 1: build a three-lens profile of a real audience you will speak to this term, such as this class for your next speech. Write one finding for each lens as a tendency, put an adaptation beside it, and say how you could check one of the findings. Describe the group, never a named person.
• Problem 2: describe a real recent moment when your own listening broke down, in a class, a meeting, a briefing, or a conversation. Say whether hearing happened, and name the stage of the listening process where it broke, with a reason.
• Problem 3: name the barrier in that same moment and pair it with one active-listening habit (focus, withhold judgment, paraphrase, or take lean notes). Try the habit the next time you listen to a class, a meeting, or a briefing, and report one difference you could observe.
• Problem 4: a chatbot asked to "analyze my audience of college students" returned this illustrative line: "College students are busy, budget-conscious, and always on their phones." Name at least two things it is missing as an audience profile.

Explain it to a non-expert

A friend has to give a five-minute update at their community choir's season meeting and tells you, "I'll write it once, and it'll work for any crowd." Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains, in everyday words, how to read an audience through the three lenses before speaking, offers one adaptation that fits the choir, and names one limit, such as that a guess about a group is a tendency to check, not a fact about each person in it. Explain any course term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible; this message is scored with Problem 4.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a coworker preparing a two-minute welcome for a parents' night at a youth swim club, who asks why the same talk would not work at the staff meeting. Model answer: "Think about who will be in the room, what they already know and care about, and how much time and attention they have. Most parents at that night are probably new to the club and want to know what their kid's first week looks like, while staff already know the schedule. So for the parents, I'd swap the club jargon for plain words and open with what happens at the first practice. Remember that those are guesses about the group; ask the front desk what new families usually ask before you lock anything in."

Use that pattern for your friend, with your own wording and examples.

Show how you got each answer. A reader should be able to check every count and every label without guessing which numbers you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single piece of work containing:

• the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief explanation the task names for that problem;
• your three-lens profile, your listening-log moment with the habit you tried, and your critique of the chatbot line; and
• your message to the friend, explaining in everyday words how to read an audience through the three lenses, with one adaptation and one limit.

Keep it to roughly one to two pages. Clear and specific beats long. Describe groups and situations only, never a named real person.

Choose how you show it. Present your work as written text, or as a spoken explanation recorded as audio or video of about three minutes with a transcript. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the counting, the profiling, the listening log, the explanations, and the writing yourself, without any AI tool. Problem 4 asks you to critique a printed line; you do not need to open any tool to do it. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com