Introduction: Doing Listening or

Teaching Listening?

Rationale for this book

There is evidence in the literature suggesting that language teachers find the
teaching of listening particularly challenging (Chambers, 1996; Field, 2008)
and that they may be unsure of how to teach listening in a principled man-
ner (Vandergrift & Goh, 2012: 4). In this book, by listening we mean primar-
ily uni-directional listening, that is, where the person seeking comprehension
does not interact with the speaker(s), as when listening to a lecture, radio
broadcast or to an announcement, for example. Other forms of listening occur
in classrooms, of course, but are not our main focus here. From exploratory
interviews we conducted with teachers of French in the final years of second-
ary schools in England in the 2000s (Graham et al., 2011), we have concluded
that those teachers tended to talk about classroom listening development in
terms of what they did in the classroom, with little or no indication of why
those steps were followed. Teachers reports also signalled that such focus on
doing was predominantly shaped in the form of comprehension tasks, as the
following excerpt summarises: I would incorporate it [listening] into a lesson,
a topic area that Im doing and then perhaps do a blank filling, or a cloze
task, that kind of thing (p. 449). In other words, these early conversations
with language teachers did not indicate any theoretically-oriented, reflective
or informed approach to the teaching of listening, at least not in our sample.
Our findings led us to wonder how widespread such an unprincipled
approach to listening pedagogy might be. By principled, we mean based
on some understanding of the role of listening in language learning, the fac-
tors that influence how well learners can comprehend spoken language (or
not), and on some knowledge of what research has uncovered about which
teaching approaches might be beneficial for the development of listening as
a skill. With those thoughts in mind, we designed and conducted a larger-
scale study in which we investigated the beliefs and practices about listening
held by a group of Modern Foreign Language (MFL) teachers in England.
Indeed, and as reported in further detail in Part II of this book, the teaching