When teachers and administrators discuss developing student listening comprehension skills, they tend to lump all listening skills together. We will explore the five different listening categories below. Four of the five skills are grouped in what some people may call active listening. Those skills need to be explicitly taught and practiced in multiple ways throughout a student’s school experience for them to really grasp the nuances. Critical listening – analyzing, synthesizing, evaluating.Strategic listening – finding the main idea, summarizing, inferring.Informational or precise listening – finding details, retelling, sequencing.Discriminative listening – distinguishing sounds, phonemes, and non-verbal cues.
Passive listening or appreciative listening – oral reading, theater, music.In reality, however, it makes more sense to think of listening as related skill sets: When discussing listening comprehension, education professionals often think of it as a single skill.
