ABSTRACT The integration of virtual platforms, such as Second Life (SL) in language learning has gained attention, particularly in enhancing listening comprehension (LC) and affective factors. Thus, the present study aimed to examine the effectiveness of task-based learning on SL for Iranian upper-intermediate L2 learners, focusing on improvements in listening comprehension, attitude, and anxiety. A mixed-methods approach with a quasi-experimental pretest posttest design was employed, with two groups of 30 learners each, aged 18 to 25. The experimental group participated in a seven-session task-training program on SL, while the control group did not receive any task-training. Three data collection instruments were used: IELTS listening tests, an attitude questionnaire, and semi-structured interviews. The results indicated that the task-based training on SL significantly improved the experimental group’s listening comprehension. Additionally, the experimental group participants reported reduced anxiety and increased positive attitudes toward the learning process as they were invited to engage and contribute to their learning, in contrast to the control group. The findings suggested that task-based learning on virtual platforms like SL can be a valuable tool for enhancing L2 learners’ listening achievement and managing affective factors. This approach offers practical implications for incorporating virtual environments in language education to support both cognitive and emotional aspects of learning.

ABSTRACT Radical listening is a way to hear minoritized speakers’ reframed, reclaimed, counter-histories which amplifies the stories that dominant narratives miss, ignore, or silence. As a critical communication of race strategy, radical listening hears racialized power differentials, listening to personal story alongside history, structures, and institutions. Radical listening can soothe racial exhaustion, an embodied experience for both people of color (who are tired of their race stories not being heard) and white people (who are tired of having to listen to race stories). I draw my radical listening data from the intergenerational, racial dialoging project called Interrupting Privilege that my team at the University of Washington’s Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity and I have run since 2016. Interrupting Privilege participants gather to listen to stories shared by participants; engage in deep and sustained dialogs about race, racism, and its many intersectional iterations (racialized sexism, racialized homophobia, racialized ableism, racialized transphobia, racialized colorism, racialized Islamophobia, and on); learn how to process their own discomfort around these topics; and construct solutions to each other’s concerns. Radical listening as a way of moving through racial exhaustion ultimately leads to racial changemaking, an individual-meets-structural means of more equitably reshaping our racialized world.

ABSTRACT Classroom conversations, such as those implemented through dialogic and deliberative pedagogies, can help students develop skills for democratic listening, but existent norms and power differences can limit the opportunity for students to use those conversations as a site for transformation. The co-creation of community agreements, however, can allow students to challenge dominant ways of speaking and knowing and grant them agency over the conversation. This study analyses community agreements created by high school and university students enrolled in a civic engagement program to understand students’ expectations for listening across difference. Findings reveal that students conceptualize listening as a responsibility for both the listener and the speaker and that they draw on norms of dialogic and deliberative practice that center community voice and transformation. Students hope that listeners uphold respect, open-mindedness, curiosity, and a commitment to safety, learning, and change. As a speaker, they aim to practice truth and social support. The study finds that students recognize reciprocal, dialogic listening as a crucial civic skill that helps to center community voice and enables the creation of shared power required for transformative change.

ABSTRACT Listening is recognized as an essential skill in academics, professional careers, and personal relationships. A gap exists in listening scholarship regarding the study of students’ examination of their listening. The aim of this research was to analyze students’ self-perceptions of the influence of listening practices on their academic performance and personal lives. We engaged in this listening study within a speech communication course, a general education requirement at a STEM-focused private university in the southeastern United States. We integrated listening instruction and activities in 17 sections of the traditional speech course taught during three consecutive semesters. We used anonymous end-of-course self-evaluation prompts to assess the efficacy of students’ listening strategies. Most students perceived that their grades and personal lives were positively impacted by their use of listening strategies. Students categorized their listening as one of twelve listening strategies modified from published studies. We related the number of reported listening strategies to an end-of-course survey prompt. Students using greater numbers of listening strategies perceived improvement in their personal lives. Our results demonstrate the persistent, consistent instruction and activities in support of student use of listening strategies impacted student perceptions of learning and the impact of listening on their personal lives.

ABSTRACT Through a cultural-rhetorical method of value analysis, this study explores patterns of listening values across distinct geographical regions, focusing on shared and diverging cultural values of listening using “listening codes.” Using a values analysis approach, data from the Pacific Northwest (PNW), Upper Midwest (UMR), and Rocky Mountain Range (RMR) regions in the United States reveal both shared and region-specific listening values. While certain interpersonal communication values like openness and authenticity are universal, others vary and more closely reflect their unique cultural contexts. We suggest a cultural-rhetorical approach to understanding regional listening codes enhances ways scholars can come to deeper understandings regional cultural identities. Such understanding promotes greater cultural competency in communication and offers a dynamic methodological approach to future researchers studying communication culturally influenced ethics and interpersonal communication values.

ABSTRACT This article explores Listening as an ethical alternative within communication theory. Drawing on two empirical explorations – that is, two spectatorial experiences of silence and noise – this debate is grounded on the realization that our everyday experience is entirely immersed in the intensified, accelerated and incessant (or perhaps more aptly, blinding) noise of the visible, enclosing the individual on its own subjectivity, unable to reach the other. Thus, it constitutes a barrier that obstructs access to and the understanding of difference and impedes a grasp of the meaning of events. This systemic environmental barrier carries ethical implications, which will be discussed within the framework of Luhmann’s systems theory. Our approach intends to develop the concept of Listening as an act profoundly rooted in the possibilities and consequences of action. Bringing forth a set of arguments related to the ethics of Listening from authors, such as Beard, Lipari, Voegelin or Bodie and Crick, we argue that Listening constitutes the act of the listener-spectator – a political subject who, through Listening, is able to discern and differentiate – promoting an ethical spectatorship that embraces otherness while offering an alternative to models of spectatorship that politically disengage the subject.

ABSTRACT This qualitative study investigates the relationship between media coverage and ethical and culturally responsive listening in the context of the Sámi people, Europe’s sole indigenous group, and their third-generation human rights. The analysis of narrative functions of online news articles (n = 13) reveals how narratives surrounding the Sámi intersect with ethical and culturally responsive listening principles. The study presents two conclusions: Media narratives successfully integrate diverse voices and perspectives, aligning with ethical and culturally responsive practices. These narratives actively enable authentic representations of Sámi culture and human rights. However, the study also detects underlying inconsistencies in narratives and questions the attribution of human agency. These findings underscore the need for more culturally sensitive media narratives about Indigenous communities. They emphasize the complexities of decolonizing communication, even when ethical and culturally responsive elements appear on the surface. Overall, this research advances the discourse on media representations of Indigenous communities and emphasizes the significance of ethical and culturally responsive listening in fostering more equitable representations.

ABSTRACT The present study aims to improve doctors’ active listening skills after imparting training, with a significant focus on teaching active listening skills in a workshop format. The authors believe that improving active listening skills helps increase cultural competence. Social competence indicators include empathy, emotional regulation, doctor-patient communication, and verbal and nonverbal communication skills. Seventy-three volunteer doctors participated during their first year of clinical internship training (house job) following their degree completion in medicine. The study used a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design to assess training effectiveness through valid and reliable self-reported assessment tools. The posttest was carried out after 7 days and follow-up after 3 weeks of training while interacting with patients in a healthcare setting before filling the same measures used in the pretest condition. A Paired sample t-test revealed significant improvements in scores on the scales in pretest-posttest and follow-up conditions that reflected enhancement in active listening, cultural competence, doctor patient communication, and social competence’s indicators (empathy, emotional regulation, verbal and nonverbal communication skills). Active listening, after controlling baseline measures and demographic, significantly and positively predicted cultural competence, doctor-patient communication, and social competence indicators in both posttest and follow-up. Findings, along with study limitations and future research directions, are discussed.

ABSTRACT In today’s educational landscape, in-service teachers (IST) should strive to find ways that allow students to expand upon their social and emotional skills. The act of sacrificial listening (SL) has the potential to build understanding between unfamiliar voices. Building upon the knowledge surrounding this specific act of listening, this arts-based qualitative case study used solicited audio diaries to investigate an IST’s understanding of SL, including its key components and their experiences resulting from applying SL during morning meetings. Findings from audio diaries and final interviews with the IST demonstrate how SL corresponds to and builds on several existing theories related to education. The use of SL within morning meetings provided students with opportunities to make connections, strengthen relationships, interact with different cultures, and SL was found to have the ability to be featured in a variety of content areas.