Teaching listening
Listening, hardly mentioned at all in journals in the 1970s has
today come into its own. Although it continues to be ignored
in second language acquisition theory and research, at least in
teaching it now plays a much more prominent role.
University entrance exams, school leaving and other
examinations have begun to include a listening component,
acknowledging that listening proficiency is an important
aspect of second language proficiency, and if it isn't tested,
teachers won't pay attention to it. An early view of listening
saw it as the mastery of discrete skills or microskills
(e. g. Richards 1983) and that these should form the focus of
teaching and testing.
A skills approach focused on such things as
(Rost 1990):
! discriminating sounds in words, especially phonemic
contrasts.
! deducing the meaning of unfamiliar words.
! predicting content.