Metaglossia: The Translation World

An updated database of online articles and posts

An updated database of online articles and posts

Hearing, for the most part, is a no-brainer. When we listen, that’s when the neurons really fire.

Hearing is an anatomical function for most people while listening is a conscious skill. This blog demonstrates poor listening skills and practices to improve them.

The necessity of good listening skills to your managerial performance is often...
Topics : Kelly Services
The necessity of good listening skills to your managerial performance is often underrated, but understanding their importance and adopting the following simple, yet imperative, strategies will help you display good listening skills and improve your overall performance.
• Don't confuse "hearing" with "listening."
This is one of the most common errors made by many people, staff and management alike. Hearing is a simple human function while listening is a skill, like hitting a baseball, playing a musical instrument, learning accounting, etc. Listening skills can improve by learning proper techniques and then practice, practice and practice.
• Focus and concentrate your attention.
Concentrate on the spoken words, their meanings and any obvious body language displayed by the speaker. At all costs, refrain from letting your focus drift to your next meeting, phone calls that must be made, stopping to pick up bread and milk after work, or any other subject other than closely listening to the speaker.
• Display your understanding.

Being a good listener has many benefits, especially in the workplace. People with well-developed listening skills are more productive, are better problem solvers, and have healthier interpersonal relationships. But without the proper training, two things can stand in the way of effective listening: bad habits and style differences. The first step to becoming a better listener is to break and eliminate those habits. The second step is to understand the different ways people listen, along with its benefits and potential trouble spots.
Effective Listening Skills can help anyone become a better listener. Using a five-step process, individuals learn how to eliminate barriers to good listening, improve communication skills, maximize productivity, and build interpersonal relationships. Available as a classroom training program and an e-learning program, Effective Listening Skills is part of the Reproducible Training Library, a full suite of unlimited-use content t

This session provides a study of listening/feedback behavior from a cognitive and skills-based perspective as an integral part of the communication process. The focus is on development of listening/feedback skills, and an awareness of barriers to effective listening and feedback.

Listening is a cognitive construct.

Dwight Harfield developed the Harfield Cognitive Listening Model, a model of listening that involves thinking components.

The Model focuses on three components: Thinking preferences, Focus & Attention, and remembering

Thinking Preferences- How do our thinking selves (right-brained or left-brained) affect listening?

Focus & attention- We only have one target of focus. When we are focused, nothing else in our environment exists. Our brain organize thoughts and helps us to be absorbed in what we are doing and thinking.

Remembering- we only remember what we are emotionally connected to.

Listening Activity for focus and attention-

-Hand each participant an index card

Advanced - Listening Skills

Dear Abby: I'm really bad when it comes to speaking. It's hard for me to squeak out the few words I can. I am shy and not very sociable, so when I'm with people, even my two friends, I feel like I come across as rude.

Of all the benefits of social media for business, the greatest come from listening. Consider this: you can listen unobtrusively – no one needs to know you’re paying attention. You don’t even need to sign up for accounts to listen. This is a great place for the socially-shy business to dip its toes into social media. After you’ve observed some success from listening, it’s also easier to make the case to senior management for social engagement.

Here are some tips to help you improve your ability to monitor the online chatter:

1. Get right with Google. You might use Google and other search engines regularly, but you’re probably not making best use of advanced features. Not everyone knows the basics of Google. It’s common to do a search and get millions of results. But you’d be better off getting fewer, but more relevant, results. Your overall goal is to improve your “signal to noise” ratio. So learn these basic tips:

Put the exact search term in quotes, such as “Bob Jones University” to eliminate spurious results when using common words
Use the “site” operator to restrict your search to only one website, such as “Form 990 site:irs.gov”
Use Boolean operators, such as OR, as in “Bob OR Bobby Knight”
The exclude operator ( – ) eliminates specified words: “Bob Dylan young -forever” eliminates references to the song “Forever Young” from your results

Most people think being a journalist boils down to asking questions and writing down answers.

That’s part of it — the simple part. It’s easy to ask a question, jot down the answer and move to the next question.

But an even bigger part is what journalists do while playing the role of transcriptionist. The real challenge of an interview is to really listen to the subject. To watch reactions and facial expressions. To hear word choices and tone. To always remember context and setting. If you aren’t listening closely, you’re really nothing more than a transcriptionist.

If you can take the time to listen, you learn something knew every day. And you are fortunate to be given the opportunity to hear.

That fact was hammered home as I listened to Jim Haneghan while sitting inside Spudos just before Thursday’s lunch rush.

Haneghan is 67 years old and has been an ordained deacon in the Catholic church for 15 years. For more than eight years, he’s worked as a chaplin for OSF Homecare’s hospice program.

Haneghan was born in Galesburg, baptized at St. Patrick’s Church and has lived his entire life in his hometown.

Listening to Haneghan I learned permanent deacons are clerics in the Catholic Church — members of the clergy who are not on the path to priesthood. Deacons can be single or married. But if you are a married deacon, you must have been married before you start the five-year process of becoming an ordained deacon. If a deacon’s wife dies, he may not remarry.

Are you are a manager or leader of an intercultural team? Or do you work within an intercultural company? If so, are you experiencing intercultural communication problems? Take a look at the photo — is that how you try to solve your intercultural communication problems?

Accustomed as we are, in the West at least, to cause and effect thinking, we are convinced that surely there must be a formula somewhere that we haven’t found yet. However, the flaw in this logic is that this is the wrong way to look at such problems. Intercultural communication problems are not a puzzle to be solved. That is why I prefer to use the metaphor of a dance when discussing these, this is closer to what happens when we communicate.

In a dance, such as a tango or waltz, everyone knows the basic steps. Then the dance changes slightly, according to who we dance with. This forces both partners to adapt. We prefer some partners to others. And we dance better with some people and worse with others. We also enjoy ourselves more with particular partners. There is always someone who leads and someone who follows; both roles are important and it is clear which is which in an actual dance.

Q: I am a senior manager who works for a public-sector organization. I have been advised during a formal performance review that I need to improve my listening skills.

Standard Format. Pre-listeningListeningPost-listening.

During my first few months at MarketWave, I heard what has become a bit of a legendary story. The short version: Tina was on a conference call with some engineers from a client company discussing how hackers could sit outside of a company’s building and literally break into its network from the parking lot using homemade devices as simple as stuff they would find at Radio Shack. As she listened, she put the call on mute and voiced the term “drive-by hacking” to our team. The phrase not only attached a memorable phrase to the issue, but sparked a story angle, which our firm later pitched and landed on CNN.

The story stuck with me, serving as a reminder that great ideas can sometimes come from unlikely places and that active listening can really pay off. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that, like other skills, we have to hone and develop our ability to actively listen and process information.

Here are five guidelines I tend to follow:

Believe in the benefits. Improving relationships, gaining insight, improving clarity, sparking new ideas and learning something new.
Focus and re-focus. It’s so easy to get distracted. Have the walls always been that color? Why do these people keep walking by? Ugh, I need to reschedule that doctor’s appointment. Put all other thoughts aside and stay in the moment.

I am a massive fan of keeping up to date with what is happening in the world, and I always try to convince my international students of the importance of reading and listening to the news. In fact, I would go so far as to say that this is the very best way of improving your English, as well as giving you lots of ideas and information for writing essays and doing various types of academic speaking.

The problem, for many learners, is that it's just too difficult - the news articles they find are too long and complicated, and they can't see any improvement quickly enough. They just give up.

Every week I buy deli meat, usually at the same grocery stores. This past month I had a frustrating experience at one store.
I asked the deli clerk for one-third pound of honey ham. He appeared distracted and said,
“Was that a half-pound?”
No, I told him, it was a third.
The clerk cut the meat and then handed it to me. It was one-half pound.
I said, “I only want one-third.”
He took the meat back, removed the extra slices, and then gave it back to me.
“Anything else?” he asked.
Rather than go through that again, I told him no thanks.
Having been waited on by this person before, I knew he didn’t listen well. His habit of not paying attention and therefore asking people to repeat themselves, causes customers to feel irritated and may affect sales.
To employers, listening carefully is a most important soft skill. I talked with Debbie Risher of Crofton, owner/president of Belair Engineering and Service Co., Inc., to find out how essential listening is in her business.

Skill Building Exercises Table of Contents Suggested Skills-Enhancing Exercises for Interpreters of All Languages 1 a. Effective Listening 1 b.SKILL ENHANCING EXERCISES Rev. 20090413 2 ...

How to interview candidates with better listening and observance skills to make the right hires.

Interview Process: Be a Better Listener

August 7th, 2012
Interviewing potential employees is not just about all the questions you plan to ask – it’s about reading between the lines with effective listening skills. From verbal listening to non-verbal cues, the best interviewers understand that there is often more to be said than just the words on a resume. How well you listen makes a big difference in terms of the quality of candidates you choose to move forward with.

Being a great interviewer is a little like being a psychiatrist. It takes active listening skills to do the job well. When we say “active listening” we mean engaging each candidate fully through meaningful questions, interactive conversation, and clarifying the candidate’s responses through verbal feedback throughout the process. It also means using other recruiting tools that help put the candidate at ease.

How to Be a Better Listener in Interviewing

These are some tips for being a more effective listener as you work to improve the interview process for yourself and each candidate – a skill that will help you to choose the right match for each assignment.

‘Listening’ as a skill has been receiving a lot of importance lately. Researches on the subject have proven that listening can be improved a great deal. It has been also concluded to a certain extent that listening promotes communication skills. It means a person who can listen to accurately can also speak effectively and precisely.

There are many physical and physiological barriers to listening. A sheer lack of objective and concentration could also prove a potential impediment to the listening process. As suggested earlier, researches have proven that ‘listening’ is a skill and could be developed meticulously. In this article we are going to deal with some proven ways to improve listening skills. Do read them
all carefully and comprehend the essence.

Twenty translators working on the Empowering Educators: Tamkeen Professional Development project took part in a workshop this July, organized by the Professional Development Division, in the School Operations Sector.

The goal of the workshop was to ensure high-quality standardized translation for the program.
The Empowering Educators: Tamkeen program supports the development of qualified and skilled school leaders and teachers who can support the ADEC as it aims to enhance the quality of educational outcomes achieved by students. Professional development workshops and one-on-one coaching for the program are presented in both English and Arabic, according to participants' needs.

Well, for this purpose you can listen to the English radio, watch good English movies. Talk to someone who is a good speaker of English language (You will get to know more about the pronunciation). Get some audios on how to improve pronunciation in English language.

Learn more about how a particular word in English is pronounced in two different ways. Because, sometimes a particular word in English language is pronounced in two or three different ways. (a word in English is sometimes pronounced differently in US English, UK English, and Australian English etc).

A piece of advice for IELTS test takers:

Now, let me give you a brief picture of what you can, as a test taker of IELTS, do in order to get the best results in your test. Here, I know, it is not necessary for me tell the readers that this test will assess all of the four major skills related to the language. The skills such writing skills, reading skills, speaking skills and listening skills are assessed by the examiners.

Why skills are assessed?

The purpose is very simple. In order to speak English language you need to be good speaker, a good listener. And in order to send across your thoughts in English language through means such as papers etc you need to be a good writer. If you are not a good knower of the English then naturally you will have no chance to impress people round you. That is the reason why all the skills are assess in this test.

In order to be able to either study or work in Australia or any other English speaking country it is necessary that you speak in the manner the natives of those countries do. Otherwise you will be labeled as a non-local.

In our Neuron Learning "Learning Times" series Neuroscientist Dr Martha Burns explains the significance of reading skills for building listening skills in children. Its not about teachers talking less!

We often think of listening skills as one of the tools we need in the business culture and I am one of the first to adopt that philosophy. After all, my degree is in Business Management.

After watching sound engineer, and all round sound expert, Julian Treasure’s TED Talk entitled “5 ways to listen better” I came across a game called Sound Ball that he featured in a post on his blog (August 2011). The post included a description of 5 games, sent to Julian by musician and music teacher Huw Lloyd, who primarily uses the games to improve the listening skills of his music students.

Sound Ball is a simple game that could be an effective way to improve the listening skills that Psychology students need to engage meaningfully in discussion and debate. The game also has the potential to increase the likelihood a student will make a verbal contribution in a lesson.