Week 2 · Chapter

Chapter 2 — Listening & Audience Analysis

Public Speaking Free sample edition

The module's primary reading · ~35–45 minutes · Objective 2 (listen actively and critically, distinguishing hearing from listening and matching the type of listening to the situation, and analyze an audience through demographic, psychographic, and situational lenses to adapt a message's content, examples, language, and level to that audience and occasion without stereotyping) · Read it first this week; the lecture, the slide deck, the tutorial, the quiz, and the Speech Workshop all build on it.

In plain language

This week is about the two halves of every speech: the people listening and the person who has to reach them. You learn the difference between hearing (sound reaching your ears, which happens on its own) and listening (choosing to pay attention and make sense of what you hear). You learn the kinds of listening, what gets in the way, and the habits that fix it. Then you turn around and become the speaker, doing audience analysis (finding out who your listeners are, what they already think and know, and what situation they are in). Last, you use what you found to make adaptations (changes to your speech that fit those particular people).

Why you already care about this

You are explaining the weekend plan to your roommate: the bus leaves at 9, bring a jacket, and you will split the gas money for the ride home. Your roommate nods the whole time. A minute later they ask, "Wait, what time is the bus?" Every word reached their ears. None of it stayed. You have been that roommate, too, nodding through a group-project call while you answered a text.

Now flip it. You are the one giving a five-minute speech to a first-year seminar of about 30 students, all of whom eat in the same campus dining hall. Your topic is the food waste in that dining hall. If you talk to them the way you would talk to a room of chefs, or of scientists, or of your closest friends, you will lose them. The words will reach their ears, and the meaning will not.

This chapter covers both sides of that gap: what it takes to really listen, and what it takes to know who is listening to you.

By the end of this chapter you will be able to:

tell hearing from listening in a real moment, and say which one failed;
trace a listener through the five stages of the listening process and name the stage where meaning got lost;
match each of the five types of listening to the job it does;
name a barrier to listening in a scene and pick the active-listening habit that cures it;
read an audience through the demographic, psychographic, and situational lenses, and tell a tendency from a stereotype;
turn each finding about an audience into an adaptation, and adjust during a speech by reading feedback.

Carry this line with you: hearing happens to you; listening is something you do.

Where we are

Already covered: Week 1 gave you the six-element communication model (source, message, channel, receiver, noise, feedback), the four kinds of noise, ethical speaking, a way to manage nerves, and the rehearsal loop.
This week: hearing versus listening, the listening process, the five types of listening, the barriers and their cures, and audience analysis through three lenses, ending in adaptation.
How they connect: Week 1 named the receiver and feedback; this week looks closely at what the receiver does and at how a speaker learns about receivers before and during a speech.
Where we're going next: Week 3, Selecting a Topic, Purpose & Thesis, uses the audience you learn to analyze here to choose and narrow a topic and write a purpose that fits it.

Week 1 is the only week behind you, and this chapter leans on three of its ideas. The receiver is the person who decodes a message. Noise is anything that blocks shared meaning, in four kinds: physical, physiological, psychological, and semantic. Feedback is the receiver's response, and in the transactional picture it arrives the whole time you speak. Keep those three in mind. Listening is what a good receiver does, and audience analysis is how a good source plans for receivers.

1. Hearing versus listening: choose to take the message in

Go back to the roommate and the bus time. The sound of your voice arrived. Their ears worked. Something still failed, and it failed after the sound arrived.

That gap has two names.

Hearing is the physical, automatic process of sound waves reaching the ears and the brain registering them; it happens whether or not a person pays attention.

Listening is the mental, deliberate process of paying attention to a message, making sense of it, responding to it, and remembering it; unlike hearing, it is a choice.

Hearing is like a phone that receives a text. Listening is opening it, reading it, and replying. You cannot switch hearing off in a noisy cafeteria. You can switch listening off in a quiet room, and most of us do, many times a day.

Worked example — the bus time. Sort what happened in the roommate scene.

Did hearing happen? Yes. Your roommate was in the room, awake, with working ears. The words "the bus leaves at 9" reached them.
Did listening happen? No. They never chose to focus on the time, so it was never understood or kept.
How do you know? Their question a minute later asked for the one fact you had already given. That question is feedback, and it shows the gap.

In words: hearing delivered the sound, and listening, the part that turns sound into meaning, never started.

This matters for you twice over. As a listener in class, at work, or in a job interview, you get more out of every message if you listen on purpose. As a speaker, you learn that your audience hearing you is not the finish line. Every listener in your seat has to choose to listen, and part of your job is to make that choice easy.

Misconception check. Students often think hearing and listening are the same act, so if someone was in the room, they got the message. That is tempting, because in everyday speech we use the two words as if they meant one thing. But hearing is automatic and listening is a choice. A full room of people who can hear you is not yet a room of people who are listening.

Memory hook: the ears receive; the mind decides.

2. The listening process: follow one listener through five stages

If listening is a choice, it is really a chain of choices. Communication scholars break it into stages so you can see where it breaks.

The listening process is the five stages a listener moves through to turn sound into kept meaning: receiving, attending, understanding, responding, and remembering.

Here is each stage, with the question it answers:

Receiving — the first stage of the listening process, in which the words and cues of a message physically reach the listener; it is the only stage hearing covers. Did the sound and the sight of the message arrive?
Attending — the stage of the listening process in which a listener chooses to focus on one message and set other sights, sounds, and thoughts aside. Did the listener pick this message to focus on?
Understanding — the stage of the listening process in which a listener makes sense of a message by connecting its words to what they already know. Did the words turn into meaning?
Responding — the stage of the listening process in which a listener gives feedback, such as a nod, a question, or a paraphrase, that shows how the message landed. Did the listener show what they took away?
Remembering — the stage of the listening process in which a listener keeps the message and can recall or use it later. Will the message still be there tomorrow?

Worked example — one listener in the first-year seminar. This week's running example is a student's informative speech on food waste in a campus dining hall, given to a first-year seminar of about 30 students who all eat there. The speech, its speaker, and its audience are illustrative and attributed to no one. Follow one listener through the five stages.

Receiving: the words "plate waste" reach her ears over the hum of the projector fan.
Attending: she turns her phone face down. She has chosen this message over the group chat.
Understanding: she links "plate waste" to the half-finished pasta she left at lunch. The term now means something to her.
Responding: she nods, and after the speech she asks where the compost goes.
Remembering: at her next lunch she notices the scale at the return window.

In words: hearing covered only stage 1, and the other four stages were choices she made, each of which the speaker could help or hurt.

Notice what the speaker can do at each stage. A clear voice helps receiving. A first sentence about their own lunch helps attending. A plain definition helps understanding. A pause invites responding. A detail they will see again tomorrow, like the scale at the return window, helps remembering.

Misconception check. Students often think listening is over once the listener understands. That is tempting, because understanding feels like the goal. But a message that is understood and then forgotten by dinner did not do its job. Responding and remembering are stages too, and a speaker can plan for both.

Pause and reflect. Choose one option and jot two or three sentences.

(a) Think of a class or meeting where you heard everything and remembered almost nothing. Which of the five stages broke down first for you, and what would have kept it going?

(b) Think of a speech, lecture, or talk you still remember well. Which stage did the speaker help most, and how did they do it?

Memory hook: five links, not one — and any one can break.

3. Types of listening: match the type to the job

You do not listen to a breakup call the way you listen to directions to a job site. Different situations ask for different kinds of listening.

This course names five types of listening, each matched to a purpose:

Discriminative listening — listening to tell sounds and cues apart, such as a change in a speaker's tone or an unusual noise from an engine.
Comprehensive listening — listening to take in and understand content, such as directions, a lecture, or a briefing; also called informational listening.
Critical listening — listening to evaluate how strong a message is by weighing its evidence and reasoning; also called evaluative listening, it means judging fairly, not being negative.
Empathic listening — listening to understand a speaker's feelings and point of view, without judging or fixing; also called therapeutic listening.
Appreciative listening — listening for enjoyment, such as to music, a well-told story, or a skilled performance.

Worked example — five scenes, five types. Each scene below is illustrative and attributed to no one. Name the type each one calls for.

A bus rider hears the driver's voice tighten on an announcement and realizes the route is changing. The rider is telling cues apart, so this is discriminative listening.
A nursing cohort that has finished a pharmacology unit sits through a briefing on a new medication-check routine. They need to take in the steps, so this is comprehensive listening.
A neighborhood association hears a pitch to fund a youth soccer team's travel. Members weigh whether the reasons and numbers hold up, so this is critical listening.
A friend calls to say they did not get the job they wanted. You are there to understand how they feel, not to fix it, so this is empathic listening.
You sit in the back row at a cousin's jazz recital and let the music carry you. That is appreciative listening.

In words: the type is set by the job the listening has to do, not by the setting or the speaker.

As a speaker, this tells you something about your own audience. The first-year seminar hearing the running speech is mostly doing comprehensive listening, because an informative speech asks them to take in content. That is why a clear structure and plain definitions matter so much for that speech.

Misconception check. Students often think critical listening means being negative, picking a speech apart. That is tempting, because "critical" sounds like "criticize." But critical listening means evaluative: you weigh the evidence fairly, and you may decide the argument is strong. A second common mix-up is empathic versus comprehensive listening. Empathic listening is about the speaker's feeling; comprehensive listening is about the content.

Memory hook: ask what the listening is for, then pick the type.

4. Barriers and active listening: catch what blocks you, then fix it

Even when you choose to listen, things get in the way. Some come from the room, some from inside you, and some from the message itself. Naming them is the first step to fixing them.

Here are the six barriers to listening this course names:

Physical noise and semantic noise, which you met in Week 1: a distraction in the setting, and a word the listener cannot decode.
Psychological noise, also from Week 1: a worry, a daydream, or a bias that pulls attention away.
Information overload, a barrier to listening in which a message delivers more facts, numbers, or terms than a listener can take in at once, so the later ones are lost.
Pseudolistening, which is pretending to listen by nodding, making eye contact, or murmuring agreement while attention is somewhere else.
Prejudging, a barrier to listening in which a listener decides what a message is worth, or what a speaker will say, before the message has been heard in full.

The cure is a set of habits.

Active listening is a set of deliberate habits that keep a listener engaged and accurate: focusing, withholding judgment until the end, paraphrasing, and taking lean notes.

Each habit answers a barrier. Focus answers physical and psychological noise: move away from the distraction, put the phone away, bring your mind back. Withhold judgment answers prejudging: hear the whole message before you decide. Paraphrase answers semantic noise and pseudolistening, because you cannot restate what you never took in. Take lean notes answers information overload: write a few keywords, not every sentence, so you keep the structure without losing the next point.

A paraphrase is a restatement of a speaker's point in the listener's own words, offered to check that the meaning was understood correctly. "So the shift starts at 6, and I check the cooler log first?" is a paraphrase. It shows the speaker what landed, which makes it feedback too.

Worked example — a lab-group meeting. Here is an illustrative scene, attributed to no one. Four students in a chemistry lab group meet to split up a report. One member explains the plan in a long rush: six sections, four deadlines, two sets of data, and a new formatting rule. A second member nods throughout while scrolling a phone. A third has already decided the plan will not work, because "this member's plans never do." Name each barrier and its cure.

The long rush of sections, deadlines, and rules is information overload. The cure is lean notes: jot "6 sections · 4 deadlines · new format" and ask for the deadlines again.
Nodding while scrolling is pseudolistening. The cure is focus, then a paraphrase to check: "So I have the data section, due first?"
"This member's plans never do" is prejudging. The cure is to withhold judgment until the plan has been laid out in full.

In words: each barrier has a matching habit, and naming the barrier tells you which habit to reach for.

Misconception check. Students often think a good listener is someone who looks like they are listening: steady eye contact, lots of nodding. That is tempting, because those signals are what we can see. But pseudolistening looks exactly like that. The test of listening is whether you can paraphrase the message, not whether you looked attentive.

Here is what this teaches you as a speaker. Your audience faces these same barriers while you talk. You can lower them. Define a term that might cause semantic noise. Keep each main idea to a few facts so you do not cause information overload. Give a prejudging listener a reason to keep an open mind in your first minute.

Honesty note: no listener catches every word, and no speaker can remove every barrier. The goal is to catch the barrier you can name and fix that one.

Memory hook: name the barrier, then reach for its habit.

5. Audience analysis: read the room through three lenses

Now turn your chair around. You are the speaker, and the listeners are people you need to understand before you speak. Speakers who skip this step give the same speech to every room, and it fits none of them.

Audience analysis is the work a speaker does before and during a speech to learn who the listeners are, what they believe and know, and what situation they are in, so the message can be adapted to them.

It grows out of a habit of mind. Audience-centeredness is a speaker's habit of making every choice in a speech, from examples to word choice to length, with the particular listeners in mind.

This course reads an audience through three lenses. Like the six-element model in Week 1, the three lenses are a classroom model, a simple tool you can carry, not a complete account of any real group.

Demographic lens — the view of an audience through group traits such as age, year in school, background, and major, to find tendencies across the group. Who are they?
Psychographic lens — the view of an audience through its attitudes, beliefs, values, and prior knowledge about the topic, which often matter more than group traits. What do they think, care about, and already know?
Situational lens — the view of the speaking situation: the audience's size, the occasion, the setting, the time available, and whether the listeners chose to attend. Where, when, how many, and why are they here?

One part of the situational lens gets its own pair of terms. A voluntary audience is listeners who chose to attend a speech, often because the topic already interests them. A captive audience is listeners who are required to be present, such as a class or a mandatory meeting, so the speaker must give them a reason to listen.

Worked example — the first-year seminar through three lenses. Here are the findings for the running speech's audience: a first-year seminar of about 30 students who all eat in the campus dining hall, hearing a five-minute informative speech in a classroom. All of it is illustrative.

Demographic lens: first-year students, most of them new to campus, from a mix of majors. The one trait the whole group shares is eating in that dining hall.
Psychographic lens: they have watched plates go back at the dish-return window, but most have likely never asked where the food goes, so prior knowledge is low. Some may hear "food waste" as blame for their own plates.
Situational lens: about 30 listeners in a classroom; a required seminar, so the audience is captive rather than voluntary; a five-minute speech slot.

In words: the psychographic and situational findings, not the demographic ones, say the most about how this speech should sound.

Tendency, not stereotype

Every finding above describes the group as a whole, and each one could be wrong about any single person in it. That is the caution audience analysis depends on.

Stereotyping is pinning a trait on a person, or on every member of a group, because of a group they belong to; audience analysis looks for tendencies across a group and checks them instead.

Compare two sentences about the seminar:

"Most first-year students are new to the dining hall's routines." That is a tendency across the group, and you can check it by asking a few classmates.
"This audience does not care about waste." That pins a trait on everyone, with no evidence. It is a stereotype, and a speaker who believes it will talk down to the room.

Misconception check. Students often think audience analysis is stereotyping with a nicer name. That is tempting, because both talk about groups. But stereotyping pins a trait on a person; analysis finds a tendency across a group, checks it, and stays ready to be wrong about any one listener. A second mix-up is treating demographics as the whole picture. What listeners believe and know, and the situation they are in, often matter more than their age or major.

Here is a contrast case. Picture a different audience for the same topic: a robotics club that volunteers to build a sensor for the dining hall's scale (illustrative). Same campus, many of the same demographic traits. But this is a voluntary audience with high interest in how the weighing works. The psychographic and situational lenses change everything, even though the demographic lens barely moved.

Memory hook: who, what they think, and where: three lenses, one room.

6. Adaptation: turn every finding into a change

A profile that stops at findings is only a description. The payoff is what you change because of it.

Adaptation is a change a speaker makes to a speech's content, examples, language, or level because of what audience analysis found.

Think of the profile as a table with two columns. The left column holds what each lens found. The right column, the adaptation column, holds what you will do about it. A profile with an empty right column has done half the job.

Worked example — the adaptation column for the first-year seminar. Here is the running speech's profile with both columns filled. It is illustrative.

The running speech's audience profile: each lens's finding about the first-year seminar and the adaptation it earns (illustrative)
Lens	Finding	Adaptation
Demographic	First-year students, most new to campus, mixed majors; all eat in the dining hall	Build examples from the dining hall they walk through every day, such as the dish-return window, instead of facts about "college students" in general
Psychographic	They have seen plates go back but likely never asked where the food goes; some may hear "food waste" as blame	Define "plate waste" in one plain sentence, and explain what the dining hall does with no scolding, because the speech informs and does not try to move anyone
Situational	About 30 listeners in a classroom; a required seminar, so captive; a five-minute slot	Open with a sight from their own lunch so a captive audience has a reason to listen, keep to three main ideas that fit in 5 minutes, and speak to the back row

Count what you built. There are 3 lenses, each with 1 finding and 1 adaptation, so 3 × 2 = 6 filled cells. Leave the adaptation column empty and you have only 3 cells, which is description, not analysis.

In words: every finding earned a concrete change, and the changes are about content, examples, and level, not about winning anyone over.

Common ground and identification

One kind of adaptation builds a bridge. Common ground is experiences, concerns, or values a speaker shares with the audience and names out loud, so listeners see the topic as theirs too. For the seminar, the common ground is lunch itself: "We all eat here. We have all slid a tray onto that return belt."

Common ground builds identification, the listener's sense that a speaker understands their situation and is on their side. A listener who feels that is far more likely to keep listening.

Adapting during the speech

Analysis does not stop when you start talking. Remember the transactional picture from Week 1: feedback arrives the whole time. Reading it is adaptation in real time.

Worked example — the word "diverted". Midway through the running speech, the speaker says the dining hall's leftover food is "diverted." Several listeners frown. The speaker adds "sent to donation or to compost" and moves on. The frowns ease.

In words: the faces were feedback, the frown pointed at semantic noise, and one added phrase fixed it while the speech was still going.

Here is the same move in a different room. A volunteer pitching a youth team's fundraiser to a neighborhood association sees two members glance at the clock (illustrative). The volunteer skips the second story and goes straight to the ask. The situational lens said "evening meeting, long agenda," and the feedback confirmed it.

Misconception check. Students often think a profile is finished once each lens has a finding. That is tempting, because the findings take the most thought. But analysis without adaptation is description. If a finding does not change something in your speech, ask what it should change, or drop it.

The AI-critique: a demographic cliché is not a profile

You can ask a chatbot to help analyze an audience, and you will use one as a rehearsal coach this term. Here is what often comes back. Asked to "analyze my audience of college students," a chatbot returns: "College students are busy, budget-conscious, and always on their phones." (This exchange is illustrative and names no product.)

Read that line through the three lenses. It is all demographic, and it is a cliché: it describes students in general, not this seminar. It has no psychographic row (what do these listeners know about plate waste?), no situational row (how many, where, captive or voluntary, how long?), and no adaptation column at all. It could describe any room on any campus, which means it describes none.

The cure is yours to apply. Check each line against what you actually know about your audience. Add the lenses the chatbot skipped. Then write the adaptation column yourself, because only you know the room.

Caveat: a chatbot can still help you think of questions to ask about an audience. It cannot know your audience. Treat what it gives you as a list of guesses to check, never as findings.

Memory hook: no adaptation, no analysis.

Key terms

Hearing — The physical, automatic process of sound waves reaching the ears and the brain registering them; it happens whether or not a person pays attention. (first used: 1. Hearing versus listening: choose to take the message in)
Listening — The mental, deliberate process of paying attention to a message, making sense of it, responding to it, and remembering it; unlike hearing, it is a choice. (first used: 1. Hearing versus listening: choose to take the message in)
Listening process — The five stages a listener moves through to turn sound into kept meaning: receiving, attending, understanding, responding, and remembering. (first used: 2. The listening process: follow one listener through five stages)
Receiving — The first stage of the listening process, in which the words and cues of a message physically reach the listener; it is the only stage hearing covers. (first used: 2. The listening process: follow one listener through five stages)
Attending — The stage of the listening process in which a listener chooses to focus on one message and set other sights, sounds, and thoughts aside. (first used: 2. The listening process: follow one listener through five stages)
Understanding — The stage of the listening process in which a listener makes sense of a message by connecting its words to what they already know. (first used: 2. The listening process: follow one listener through five stages)
Responding — The stage of the listening process in which a listener gives feedback, such as a nod, a question, or a paraphrase, that shows how the message landed. (first used: 2. The listening process: follow one listener through five stages)
Remembering — The stage of the listening process in which a listener keeps the message and can recall or use it later. (first used: 2. The listening process: follow one listener through five stages)
Discriminative listening — Listening to tell sounds and cues apart, such as a change in a speaker's tone or an unusual noise from an engine. (first used: 3. Types of listening: match the type to the job)
Comprehensive listening — Listening to take in and understand content, such as directions, a lecture, or a briefing; also called informational listening. (first used: 3. Types of listening: match the type to the job)
Critical listening — Listening to evaluate how strong a message is by weighing its evidence and reasoning; also called evaluative listening, it means judging fairly, not being negative. (first used: 3. Types of listening: match the type to the job)
Empathic listening — Listening to understand a speaker's feelings and point of view, without judging or fixing; also called therapeutic listening. (first used: 3. Types of listening: match the type to the job)
Appreciative listening — Listening for enjoyment, such as to music, a well-told story, or a skilled performance. (first used: 3. Types of listening: match the type to the job)
Information overload — A barrier to listening in which a message delivers more facts, numbers, or terms than a listener can take in at once, so the later ones are lost. (first used: 4. Barriers and active listening: catch what blocks you, then fix it)
Pseudolistening — Pretending to listen by nodding, making eye contact, or murmuring agreement while attention is somewhere else. (first used: 4. Barriers and active listening: catch what blocks you, then fix it)
Prejudging — A barrier to listening in which a listener decides what a message is worth, or what a speaker will say, before the message has been heard in full. (first used: 4. Barriers and active listening: catch what blocks you, then fix it)
Active listening — A set of deliberate habits that keep a listener engaged and accurate: focusing, withholding judgment until the end, paraphrasing, and taking lean notes. (first used: 4. Barriers and active listening: catch what blocks you, then fix it)
Paraphrase — A restatement of a speaker's point in the listener's own words, offered to check that the meaning was understood correctly. (first used: 4. Barriers and active listening: catch what blocks you, then fix it)
Audience analysis — The work a speaker does before and during a speech to learn who the listeners are, what they believe and know, and what situation they are in, so the message can be adapted to them. (first used: 5. Audience analysis: read the room through three lenses)
Audience-centeredness — A speaker's habit of making every choice in a speech, from examples to word choice to length, with the particular listeners in mind. (first used: 5. Audience analysis: read the room through three lenses)
Demographic lens — The view of an audience through group traits such as age, year in school, background, and major, to find tendencies across the group. (first used: 5. Audience analysis: read the room through three lenses)
Psychographic lens — The view of an audience through its attitudes, beliefs, values, and prior knowledge about the topic, which often matter more than group traits. (first used: 5. Audience analysis: read the room through three lenses)
Situational lens — The view of the speaking situation: the audience's size, the occasion, the setting, the time available, and whether the listeners chose to attend. (first used: 5. Audience analysis: read the room through three lenses)
Voluntary audience — Listeners who chose to attend a speech, often because the topic already interests them. (first used: 5. Audience analysis: read the room through three lenses)
Captive audience — Listeners who are required to be present, such as a class or a mandatory meeting, so the speaker must give them a reason to listen. (first used: 5. Audience analysis: read the room through three lenses)
Stereotyping — Pinning a trait on a person, or on every member of a group, because of a group they belong to; audience analysis looks for tendencies across a group and checks them instead. (first used: 5. Audience analysis: read the room through three lenses)
Adaptation — A change a speaker makes to a speech's content, examples, language, or level because of what audience analysis found. (first used: 6. Adaptation: turn every finding into a change)
Common ground — Experiences, concerns, or values a speaker shares with the audience and names out loud, so listeners see the topic as theirs too. (first used: 6. Adaptation: turn every finding into a change)
Identification — The listener's sense that a speaker understands their situation and is on their side, which common ground helps build. (first used: 6. Adaptation: turn every finding into a change)

Summary

Hearing is physical and automatic; listening is mental and deliberate.
The listening process runs receiving, attending, understanding, responding, remembering.
Match the listening type to its job: discriminative, comprehensive, critical, empathic, appreciative.
Critical listening means evaluative, not negative.
Six barriers block listening; focus, withhold judgment, paraphrase, and lean notes cure them.
Pseudolistening looks attentive; a paraphrase proves real listening.
Read an audience through the demographic, psychographic, and situational lenses.
A tendency across a group is analysis; a trait pinned on a person is a stereotype.
A captive audience needs a reason to listen; a voluntary one arrives with one.
Every finding earns an adaptation; a profile with no adaptation column is description.
Keep adapting during the speech by reading feedback.

Check your understanding

Work these before looking at the answers — they are ungraded, and the answers (with reasoning) are at the bottom of the page.

At a tenants' meeting, the building owner explains a new recycling schedule. One tenant listens to decide whether the owner's reasons for the change hold up. Another tenant, who has lived there for decades, mostly wants to share how hard the last change was, and a neighbor listens to understand that feeling. Name the type of listening each listener is using.
A new hire at a hardware store sits through a welcome talk that covers the alarm code, three cash-register steps, the return policy, the safety-glasses rule, and the break schedule, all in a few minutes. By the end, the new hire remembers only the alarm code. Name the barrier and one active-listening habit that would have helped.
A student plans a speech on volunteer tutoring for a community-garden volunteers' meeting. Sort each fact into one of the three lenses: (i) most volunteers are retirees and parents of young children; (ii) the meeting is a voluntary evening gathering in the garden shed; (iii) many volunteers already believe the garden should give back to the neighborhood.
A speaker preparing for a hospital volunteers' orientation writes in a profile: "Young volunteers will not take the hand-washing rule seriously." Rewrite this as a tendency worth checking, and add one adaptation.

Answers (worked reasoning — read after attempting)

The tenant judging whether the reasons hold up is using critical listening, which is evaluative: weighing the case fairly, not attacking it. The neighbor who listens to understand the long-time tenant's feeling is using empathic listening, because the goal is the feeling, not the content. If the second tenant were taking in the new schedule's days and times, that would be comprehensive listening; the job sets the type.
The barrier is information overload: more facts and steps than a new listener could take in at once, so the later ones were lost. Lean notes would have helped, such as jotting "alarm · 3 register steps · returns · glasses · breaks" and asking for the register steps again. A paraphrase at the end ("So the glasses rule is for the back room only?") would also catch gaps.
(i) is demographic: group traits, such as stage of life. (ii) is situational: a voluntary audience, the occasion, and the setting. (iii) is psychographic: a value the listeners hold. A good speaker would lean on (iii), because a shared value is common ground for a tutoring pitch.
One rewrite: "Some newer volunteers may not yet know why the hand-washing rule matters; I can check by asking the coordinator what questions new volunteers usually raise." That is a tendency, stated with care and checked, not a trait pinned on every young volunteer. One adaptation: open with a short, concrete reason for the rule, such as how quickly germs spread from hands to a shared doorknob, described in words. The original sentence was a stereotype; the rewrite is analysis.

Next up in this module: the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz. Next week the three-lens model you built here becomes the test for choosing a topic and a purpose.

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