Part I: Listening Analysis Begin by reading the Week 2 Lecture on listening, and complete the Listening Exercise to evaluate your listening skills. Write a summary of your results, your experience, and your conclusions about this.

Next, respond to the following prompts. As you compose your responses, you should make connections to the ideas contained in the listening chapter assigned for the week.

Where in the stages of listening did you experience breakdown?

What was the reason you failed to listen effectively?

What could you have done differently to improve your listening?

This part of the assignment should be written with at least four paragraphs (with a minimum of three to four sentences each) of commentary, which is in addition to any quoting from the exercise itself you may choose to do. It may be helpful to explain your thought process and provide examples to give explanation to your descriptions of why you feel that way. This is not a formal paper, but college-level spelling, grammar, and syntax are expected.

Part II: Small Group and Public Speaking Strategies Later in this course, you will read chapters that address skills in both small group communication and public speaking. This assignment is intended to get you thinking about those skills before that information is covered in class, so know that you are not expected to have fully researched responses for this part of the Week 2 assignment.

Using the Communication Improvement Strategy Table from the Week 1 Lecture, develop an improvement strategy that follows it according to the following assessments:

the checklist describing the skills covering small-group communication in Chapter 9 on page 189; and
the Test Yourself inventory on public-speaking apprehension in Chapter 11 on page 209 OR the checklist describing the steps in preparing a speech on page 234.

You may choose to format these into tables or write them in paragraph form. With whichever option, you should have clear labels for the four main areas: problem, goal, plan, and test of measurability.

Part III: Presentation Topics and Research Ideas Based on the improvement strategies and work on the CCC that you have completed up to this point, put together a numbered list of at least six presentation topics you might have an interest in researching and developing for the Week 6 assignment. Rank the topics with your strongest choice at the top of the list and the others in descending order.