The difference between listening and hearing, is that hearing is one of the senses of a human and it has the ability to perceive sounds by detecting vibrations sourced from the environment surrounding us through our ears. Listening on the other hand is used in communication, thus, called active listening. This requires a person to pay attention to the speaker and afterwards give back feedback. However, listening is somehow more advanced than hearing since it involves the brain receiving nerve impulses and then analyzes information from the speaker in order to give back the feedback.

In addition, hearing includes six stages. It has the hearing stage where sounds fill our world and compete in order to be noticed, the understanding stage where we relate what we hear to what we listen to, the remembering stage where we try to retain what we have listened, the interpreting stage where we make sense of the message using both the senders and receivers perspective, the evaluating stage where we see how worthy the message is to us and analyze it critically, and lastly the responding stage where there can be positive or negative feedback, supportive feedback and evaluating feedback.

Ineffective listening is the opposite of effective listening; it is when the listener does not absorb the information.

The habits and behaviors of ineffective listeners are that they think the subject of the speakers information does not apply to them (for example, when the teacher talks about cars, girls often are less likely to concentrate since cars is more of a boy topic) , they enter into arguments fast and judge before getting to know something/someone (for example, a beautiful and most popular girl of the class can make fun of an outsider of the class however do not know that person has a very kind and caring personality) , being distracted easily ( for example, when a person in class is fidgeting, doodling, looking at their watch or the wall watch to see if the time has past by and when something passes by the window that catches their attention easily ) , no body language towards the speaker ( for example, when a listener is engaged with a speaker they nod their head but when not listening they do not do anything, the same can happen with facial expressions when a speaker says something funny and all the class laughs but 2 or three other people don’t laugh mean that they were not paying attention. ) , they are day dreaming ( for example, when the speaker talks the listener looks at something else and does not maintain eye contact. ), ineffective listeners only use one type on note taking and takes a lot of notes and lastly, they do not exercise their mind, meaning that they see things easily and are not that much of a creative thinking mind type.