Learning to Listen to English

Abstract

A listening program to be truly beneficial must adapt to the role which ESL/EFL listening will play in the career of each student. This article considers various materials and methods for preparing students to comprehend spoken English in different career contexts in English speaking countries. The five stages of listening development are delineated for career contexts to illustrate the different listening comprehension proficiency levels needed for different careers. Practically all ESL/EFL programs have a listening component. However, the instruction given in the listening class does not always fit the listening needs of the learners. This article suggests some reasons for this. Students of a foreign language appear to pass through various somewhat indeterminate stages as they learn to comprehend native speakers. One can arbitrarily distinguish five stages of foreign language listening development, but it is probably impossible to tell just when a learner passes from one stage to the next-and probably equally impossible to identify the stage for any learner at a given time. In addition, a learner may be at one stage in comprehending certain kinds of subject matter but at a different stage for other kinds. For purposes of analysis and discussion here, however, it is assumed that these five stages are both definable and recognizable.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 25 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.