Wk 6.3 Listening: Interpretation

Within the process of listening, one needs to determine what the person is saying, thus assigning meanings to the words, actions, tones, and sounds that the other person is making. Simply put, we are to interpret what the other is communicating. In determining meaning, we base our interpretation on our individual past knowledge, social understanding, and experience, which then determine what it means to us. Thus, one’s interpretation of a person, event or thing changes the value and meaning place onto a specific thing, depending on the individual’s mindset and circumstance. Interpretation is how one categorizes what one experiences, whether it is typical, good, bad, strange or such.

As Trenholm fully discusses, we structure and organize the sensory data and information into clear images and words. As we are continually exposed to this information, we then “impose stability on what we see”, thus understanding the existence and presence of what we see and hear, even if we do not physically see it during a moment in time. Lastly we give meaning to what we see, determining its characteristics, identity, value and what it “states”.

Although this process is regularly and unconsciously done in order to understand the world and live in it, this process involves complex organization to guide us within the world. Therefore we are able to make judgments about people, events and the general world, especially as we build upon our schemata or mental guidelines to “identify and organize incoming information”, based on shared social understanding, past experiences, and current knowledge (Trenholm, 50). Interpretation is important as it tells us how we, as individuals view the world, thus indicating that there are many different ways to view the world, therefore we must be mindful that people may interpret the same thing differently that we do.