Second Language Listening: Theory and Practice

Noticeable by their absence, it is always pleasing to see the appearance of any new book that focuses on second-language listening, and the latest publication to emerge is Second Language Listening: Theory and Practice, a volume in the Cambridge Language Education series. Primarily aimed at pre- and in-service teachers interested in teaching or material design for second-language listening, it endeavours to provide up-to-date theoretical and innovative pedagogical insights into this complex field. The first part of the book (Chapters 1 to 5) is entitled ‘Historical background’. Chapter 1, ‘Approaches to language teaching and the role of listening’, outlines various teaching ‘approaches’, with each commented upon in relation to the degree to which listening is accommodated. Chapter 2, ‘Models of listening’, begins with an overview of L1 listening development from birth, then a description of an L1 model of memory processes is given, followed by a discussion of listening models—bottom-up, top-down, and interactive (i.e. a combination of the previous two). These sections are very brief. Lastly, a one-page comparison between L1 and L2 listeners is made. The content here dwells too heavily on L1 listening, and it would have been preferable to see more extensive and insightful comment throughout this short chapter related specifically to second-language listeners. Chapter 3, ‘Types of meaning for listening’, describes five sorts of knowledge that a listener may exploit—phonological, semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, and kinesic. Overall, the authors provide a fairly straightforward outline of relevant aspects of meaning processed by a listener. Chapter 4, ‘The nature of spoken language’, examines the differences between spoken and written text through the notion of classifying genres on a continuum of ‘spokeness’ and of ‘writteness’ according to a range of linguistic features. This is an interesting concept to use to relate the fact that there are different types of listening texts, some more carefully planned than others, and hence, exhibiting linguistic feature variability. The remainder of the chapter is devoted to stages of conversational listening e.g. turn-taking, negotiating meaning, etc., as the authors state this type of listening is the most common. Chapter 5, ‘Learning styles and listening strategies’, overviews learning styles in broad terms and offers an example of a learning styles questionnaire as a means for learners to discover preferred strategy type. This section does not relate specifically to L2 listening strategies and therefore its usefulness to the discussion is questionable. The next section briefly discusses characteristics of effective and ineffective listeners, followed by a list of thirty-four metacognitive, cognitive, and socioaffective strategies, and a brief but practical guide to classroom procedure.