In a 'Word of Mouth' coming up on Radio 4, I'll be talking to Dr Haru Yamada about her book 'Kiku, the Japanese art of good listening'. I hope you listen to it.
The book and my conversation with Dr Yamada has got me thinking about how we talk about 'conversation', how we describe it, how we define it. The usual way we do this is to talk about two or more people talking to each other, exchanging what they think, feel, want etc. We might talk about it as 'communication' - two people actually or trying to exchange what we feel about each other, how we exchange ideas or how we might discuss something in order to resolve a problem, or to plan something.
All these descriptions are about what we say and how we say it. There's a field of study called 'pragmatics' which is about the methods we use when we converse - taking turns, interrupting each other, 'chaining' thoughts, and strategies we use to get others to listen to us and so on. Some of pragmatics looks at the kinds of signals we give off as listeners to indicate to a speaker that we are (or are not) listening (nodding, saying 'mm' etc).
In fact, it we think about it (and I admit I mostly haven't!), half of conversation must logically be about listening. But what does it mean 'to listen'? How do we do it? What goes on, when we listen while we're in a conversation?
A lot of my thoughts in the area of language are to do with education. The present emphasis in education towards language is that it's a 'structure' and that it has 'content' than can be unloaded as if you were taking eggs out of an eggbox - finite chucks of 'stuff' that are 'in' the text that it's your job to 'get out' of the text - whether that's a written text (like a book), or speech (eg with a talk or lecture from a teacher or tutor) or in a conversation.
These models of 'structure' and 'content' are very mechanical models of how humans interact and give little room for the ideas that suggest, firstly, that the 'structures' are flexible (change over time and place) and that they depend on the 'dynamics' of who's speaking and who's listening. Secondly, the idea that language interaction is just unloading and loading, leaves out the complexity of how as humans we make things meaningful. So if you say to me, 'The station is at the end of the road', I have to bring to bear on that sentence a host of previous understandings in order to make sense of it, and I have to use contexts in order to make meaning too. To take one word from that sentence: 'station', it's a word that can mean a lot of things, when taken away from its contexts, but in context, I'll take it to most likely mean one thing in particular.
So, straightaway, I've built into 'listening' ideas to do with the flexibility and variability of language along with the listener's experience and knowledge. Some have probed that aspect of 'experience' and say that experience is full of 'schema' that we build up in our minds from the day we're born (if not from earlier in the womb). What are 'schema'? Patterns and conventions such that our minds are full of expectations as to what is being said to us and how it is being said. As I've just mentioned, the word 'station' has a network in our minds to do with bus-stations, railway stations, work stations, Playstations and so on.
There's a big new interest in education on 'oracy'. Some of this focusses on how we speak, how we can learn 'dialogically' ie through talk. There is a vast literature going back thousands of years on how we speak. Speaking is a very visible aspect of human behaviour. But speaking is predicated on the fact that (most of the time) we assume when we speak that someone is listening. And if we don't assume it, we hope they're listening, and even if we don't hope that, we carry on talking as if they're listening. One way of putting that is that we 'inscribe' the listener into how we speak. Our expectations about the listener are embedded in our choices we make about the accent we use, the dialect we use, the terminology we use, the sentence structures we use (syntax), the topics we use and even the 'genre' we're in eg joke-telling, advice-giving, commands and so on. This description of speaking 'thickens' or 'deepens' the idea of what it means to speak. We don't really have a word for this. It's something like 'speaking-with-an-awareness-of-who-I-am-speaking-to-such-that-it-affects-how-I-speak-and-what-I'm-speaking-about'.
In everyday encounters we are acutely aware of this: 'Don't talk down to me like that!' 'Don't patronise me!' 'Don't call me "dear", I'm not your dear!' and so on. So I'm wondering what would happen in education if we talked more about what is listening and what role listening plays in conversation. There is of course a very passive way of talking about listening, which is the 'jug and mug' theory of education! The teacher is the full jug and the pupil is the empty mug. The teacher pours the full jug into the pupil's empty mug. As adults, we have all said to our children and young people, 'Listen!'... meaning what exactly? That if the child looks at us, and is quiet that something important is going to be conveyed from us to them? But will it? Will I frame what I am saying in such a way that the 'schema' in the child's mind will be able to make meaning of it? And even if that's theoretically possible, what if the child is thinking about any number of other things to do with their emotional and social needs which appear at that moment to be more important than what it is that I want to say, some of which (much of which?) might be to do with what that child thinks of me!
Another complication: how do we know how the other person is listening? Mostly from what they say. But what they say is affected by who they think they're talking to and what the person they're talking back to has just said. Karl Marx once wrote that even the educator is educated. It's generally thought that what he meant by that was that even as we take actions, we're affected by the actions being taken towards us. We shape the world, yet we are shaped by the world. In conversations, we shape the conversation, yet we are shaped by it. This can only happen if we factor in listening into what we mean by speaking. Perhaps I could formulate that as 'we speak with how we listen'.
