L2Listening Chapter15

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Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and

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L2 Listening
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Steven Brown
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III
Listening and Speaking
15
L2 Listening
Steven Brown
Listening is both a language skill to be acquired and a major means of input for language acquisition.
Listening, in both L1 and L2, is a meaning-making activity that requires, in the fraction of a second,
the parallel employment of top-down and bottom-up processing. The listener must segment the
string of sounds in the input, link the sounds to words, and utilize long-term memory and contex-
tual information to give meaning to the utterance (Rost, 2011; Cutler, 2012).
Listening is purpose-driven. In the classroom and in language testing, the purpose-driven nature
of listening is recognized by a division of listening task types into finding the topic (main idea),
finding specific details, and making inferences about the message. Song (2008) was able to show that
listening and reading skills were divisible into these three sub-skills and also to suggest that reading
and listening have different paths to comprehension.
This chapter is organized around topics of current pedagogical concern in listening. It begins with
findings on factors in successful listening comprehension and presents research on those factors. It
then looks at two widely researched issues, the use of multimedia and strategies and, finally, at two
strands of classroom research, on reading while listening and extensive listening.
Factors in Listening
Numerous studies have looked at the factors that affect the process of listening. The studies have
been conceived in two broad ways: through questionnaires and simulated recalls looking at percep-
tions of difficulties by students and through factor-analytic studies looking at listener, speaker, text,
and task.
Learners, when asked about their problems in listening, often cite the speaker’s delivery speed and
individual style (hesitation behavior, accent) as troublesome; they also identify vocabulary, including
breaking up the speech stream into recognizable words, as a major issue (Wu, 1998; Hasan, 2000;
Graham, 2006). Goh (2000), in a study that combined questionnaires and interviews, enumerated
10 perceived problems. The problems fell broadly into the categories of (a) word recognition (break-
ing up the speech stream, failing to recognize known words, getting caught focusing on a word and
losing the thread of the input), (b) attention (missing the beginnings of texts, having problems with
concentration), and (c) the inability to form a coherent representation of the text (seeing the trees,
but not the forest).
201
202 • Steven Brown
In a study by Chang, Wu and Pang (2013), students had the following problems in listening:
unknown words, grammar, long sentences; noise in the room and distortion in the input; uninterest-
ing topics; attention; anxiety; speech rate and accent; and absence of repetition and other support.
Listener factors were addressed in Andringa, Olsthoorn, van Beuningen, Schoonen and Hulstijn
(2012). The listening comprehension of non-native speakers of Dutch was strongly correlated with
knowledge (vocabulary, grammatical accuracy, and ability to segment the speech stream) and pro-
cessing speed. It was less strongly correlated with IQ. The correlation with memory was weak.
Vandergrift and Baker (2015) explored the roles of listener variables in listening comprehension
for late French immersion classes in Canada. L2 vocabulary, L1 vocabulary, auditory discrimina-
tion ability, and metacognition were all significantly related to L2 listening comprehension, with L2
vocabulary having the strongest association. Vandergrift and Baker posited a path model wherein
auditory discrimination and working memory contribute to L1 vocabulary, and L1 vocabulary and
metacognition favorably influence L2 comprehension through L2 vocabulary.
Vandergrift (2006) concluded that L2 listening comprehension ability is a combination of L1 lis-
tening ability and L2 proficiency, but that L2 proficiency contributes more. Vandergrift saw vocabu-
lary knowledge as particularly useful for answering “literal” (specific information) questions.
In their review of speaker factors, Bloomfield et al. (2010) reported that L2 listeners are affected
by unfamiliar accents as well as distortion and noise in the environment. They also reported that lis-
teners may have difficulty with reduced and rapid speech. Comprehension is facilitated by discourse
markers.
Révész and Brunfaut (2013) studied advanced learners’ actual and perceived listening difficul-
ties, focusing on the listening text. Listening passages were significantly easier to comprehend if
they contained more common function words, fewer academic words, and were less dense in terms
of the information they conveyed. Difficulty was not related to syntactic complexity. In question-
naires and recalls, participants agreed that lexical complexity was an important factor, and they also
added as less important speed of delivery, clarity of pronunciation, lack of explicitness, and syntactic
complexity.
Brunfaut and Révész (2015) explored learner and task characteristics and found that lexical, dis-
course, and phonological complexity correlated significantly with comprehension. High levels of
anxiety in the students correlated with low performance.
Bloomfield et al. (2010) reported strong evidence for the facilitating effects of redundancy (par-
ticularly exact repletion), familiar topics, and global coherence.
Many of the above factors in listening have been extensively researched. We will now look in more
depth at decoding issues, vocabulary, the use of prior knowledge, and the role of affect.
Decoding Issues
Decoding is the process of breaking up the speech stream into recognizable words, which are then
held in working memory and combined with prior knowledge; situational context and co-text (what
has been said, predictions of what might be said); and knowledge of the language system (Anderson
& Lynch, 1988).
While sentences on the page are broken into words, utterances have no white space. Sounds have
effects on neighboring sounds, and speech is subject to assimilation, deletion, and insertion. In class-
rooms, learners tend to learn the dictionary form of words and may not, because of changes in pro-
nunciation due to word stress and sentence intonation, recognize those words when they are spoken
(Field, 2008a).
As we have seen, learners perceive speech rate as a major obstacle to breaking up the speech
stream. Speech rate is both idiosyncratic and subject to speech situations. Griffiths (1990) claimed
L2 Listening • 203
that speech faster than 200 words per minute, 3.8 syllables per second, impairs comprehension for
lower-level students.
Speech rate interacts with other variables, including attitude toward or familiarity with the speaker
or the speaker’s accent. Anderson-Hsieh and Koehler (1988), for example, reported that American
university students who had a favorable view of foreigners better understood faster and less profi-
cient speech by a trio of native speakers of Chinese.
Speech rate also interacts with an utterance’s grammatical complexity and speaker behaviors such
as pausing and hesitating. While grammatical complexity had no effect on comprehension in Blau
(1990), inserting pauses into the input increased comprehension significantly, compared to slowed
versions of the text. However, the filled hesitations (um, uh) of everyday speech may present chal-
lenges to learners when they interpret filler words or repetition for words or parts of words (Voss,
1979).
As a compensatory strategy to improve comprehension, teachers frequently tell their students to
listen for “key words,” the most important words in the input. Graham and Santos (2013) found that,
for students, “key words” often meant “nouns” and that students may have a noun-based approach
to listening. Thus, teachers might profitably focus on verbs in the classroom. Nouns and verbs are
both examples of content words. Field (2008a) was interested in the differential processing of con-
tent words and function words. He compared L1 English secondary students to higher- and lower-
achieving English language learners at the same school. Regardless of proficiency or L2, both English
language learner groups transcribed the content words significantly (on average 20%) better than
the function words.
When facing new words in the input, learners may ignore both context and word class to sub-
stitute a known word for an unknown one (Field, 2004). Broersma and Cutler (2008) looked at
phantom word activation, essentially incorrect guesses in the decoding process. Successful compre-
hension relies in part on suppressing the wrong guesses and choosing the correct ones. Broersma
and Cutler showed that L2 listeners cannot suppress non-words as quickly as they can in their L1.
They conclude that a major problem in word recognition is distinguishing real words from non-
words or near words. More competitors to real words are activated in L2; these competitors are often
words that do not make sense in the utterance and would be quickly discarded in L1 (Broersma &
Cutler, 2011). Field (2008c) reported that English language learners were reluctant to abandon their
first segmentation hypothesis, their preliminary guess at where one word ended and another began.
Field’s prescription for the classroom is to practice both segmentation and to probe learners on their
certainty and comprehension strategies.
One way that learners use to recognize words is phonotactics, or the probabilities of given sounds
occurring at given places in the speech stream. This is something we learn implicitly in L1 and some-
thing, claim Weber and Cutler (2006), that highly proficient, highly experienced listeners have in L2.
It is also something that can be taught explicitly, at least to adults (Al-jasser, 2008). Prince (2013) sug-
gests that incorporating the dictogloss technique into a listening comprehension program might be
effective in increasing comprehension and vocabulary retention, because it potentially helps learners
note the presence of unknown words and chunks of language. Hulstijn (2003) argues that multi-
media is particularly useful for training students in automatic word recognition.
Vocabulary and Listening

The importance of word recognition has been noted in previous sections. This section will focus on
the role of vocabulary knowledge in listening. Folse (2004) has argued for the primary importance
of vocabulary in language learning, and Vandergrift (2006) has argued specifically for a larger role
for vocabulary in listening development.
How large a vocabulary is optimal for listening comprehension? Nation (2006) estimated that
knowledge of 6,000–7,000 word families would provide 98% coverage of the Wellington Corpus of
Spoken English. Other estimates are Adolphs and Schmitt’s (2003) that knowledge of 5,000 word
families would be sufficient to understand 96% of conversational English and Webb and Rodgers’
(2009) that 3,000 of the most frequent word families, plus proper nouns and marginal words, would
give 95% coverage of television programs. Fewer words may be needed for listening comprehension
than reading comprehension because prosody and gestures may help compensate (vanZeeland &
Schmitt, 2013). While 98% coverage is usually recommended for reading comprehension, vanZee-
land and Schmitt argue that 95% of coverage, or 2,000–3,000 frequent word families, might be a good
target for comprehension of informal aural narratives.
Staehr (2009) investigated the role of vocabulary breadth and depth on listening comprehension.
Together, breadth and depth predicted 51% of the variance in listening scores among Danish uni-
versity students learning English. Further analysis showed that by far the greatest contribution was
made by vocabulary breadth; depth contributed only 2% to the total. In reality, vocabulary size and
how well the words are known are strongly correlated to each other, and it is difficult to completely
pry them apart. Bonk (2000) found a moderate positive correlation between lexical knowledge and
comprehension scores; some low-scoring individuals attained good comprehension, however, per-
haps because of the use of compensatory strategies.
Prior Knowledge and Listening

The pioneering work of Bartlett (1932) showed that prior knowledge and experience have an effect
on cognition. Prior knowledge is organized in schemata: abstract, generalized mental representa-
tions of experience that are available to facilitate comprehension of new experiences (Anderson,
1994). Schemata have been divided into content schemata, knowledge of the world or the topic at
hand, and text schemata, knowledge of discourse in general and genres in particular (Long, 1989).
Another metaphor for the storing of prior knowledge is scripts (Schank & Abelson, 1977).
The importance of schema activation activities in the classroom has been studied extensively. The
role of life experience was studied by Markham and Latham (1987), Long (1990), Chiang and Dunkel
(1992), Schmidt-Rinehart (1994), and Lesser (2004). Learners comprehended more when listening
to familiar topics. Tyler (2001) found that provision of a topic before listening lessened demands on
working memory, elevating the scores of English language learners to a level not significantly differ-
ent from that of native speakers of the language.
That schema activation is a useful pre-listening activity in classrooms is clear at this point.
Researchers and practitioners have explored a variety of other pre-listening activities as well. The
role of visual support, for example, has been of some interest. In a study by Wilberschied and Ber-
man (2004), previews illustrating summaries of the video input had a significantly greater effect on
comprehension than the same summaries alone. Ginther (2002) distinguished between “context”
and “content’ visuals. Context visuals are general descriptions of the situation found in the aural
input, while content visuals more closely illustrate the content of the input. Content visuals facili-
tated comprehension, but, interestingly, context visuals had a small negative effect, perhaps because
they activated the wrong schema.
In language testing, the role of visuals in listening comprehension is an important issue. There is
some evidence that visuals enhance comprehension. There is also some evidence that learners differ
in their use of visual information, some essentially ignoring it (Ockey, 2007). Perhaps the foremost
concern for test developers is that the inclusion of non-verbal information may test skills other
than listening ability (Batty, 2015). See Wagner (2010) for a review of issues concerning visuals in
language testing.
Another common classroom listening exercise is the pre-teaching of vocabulary. Research results
about its efficacy are mixed. Berne (1995), Elkhafaifi (2005a), and Chang and Read (2006) all found
that vocabulary instruction given immediately prior to a listening task had no significant facilitative
effects. Students in Chang (2007) were presented vocabulary lists at different times before tests. The
length of time that learners could study the word list had an effect on a test of the words themselves
but not on listening comprehension scores. Mehrpour and Rahimi (2010) looked at both reading
and listening comprehension. General vocabulary knowledge had no effect on listening comprehen-
sion, although providing specific key words before the test marginally improved performance on the
listening test. Previewing vocabulary had a greater effect on reading comprehension.
Some support for pre-teaching vocabulary has emerged, however, in studies of the efficacy of
question preview, in which learners had time to study the comprehension questions they would be
asked (Berne, 1995; Chung, 2002; Elkhafaifi, 2005a; Jafari & Hashim, 2012; Alavi & Janbaz, 2014).
Chung (2002), for example, found a combination of question and vocabulary preview effective, more
so for high-achieving students, suggesting an interaction between proficiency level and task. Jafari
and Hashim (2012) showed that a pre-listening activity providing statements giving the gist of the
listening passage and another providing a list of vocabulary items were equally effective. Alavi and
Janbaz (2014) reported no difference in listening comprehension between a question preview group
and a group that was given a list of topics (which could be considered a type of vocabulary preview),
although both groups performed better than the control group, which had no pre-listening task.
In Elkhafaifi (2005a), both question and vocabulary preview were superior to no preview at all.
However, mere repetition of the audio, a second chance to listen, increased comprehension scores for
all groups. Repetition, perhaps not surprisingly, increases comprehension (Iimura, 2007; Sakai, 2009;
Bloomfield et al., 2010). Indeed, repetition increased comprehension 18% from the control baseline
in Chang and Read (2007). A lingering question for the classroom is how much repetition should
be allowed, given time constraints and, sometimes, the necessity to prepare students for high-stakes
examinations that do not allow repetition of input. No firm prescription has emerged, but King and
East (2011) found that a single repetition was more effective than a slowed-down version of the input
at increasing comprehension. Jensen and Vinther (2003) suggest that returns for repetition may
diminish as soon as the second repetition. Robin (2007) points out that repeated listening is now the
norm, given digital video recorders and downloadable audio and video clips on websites. Listening
is potentially becoming as recursive an activity as reading.
Listening and Affect

Rost (2014) reminds us that the affective domain is at the heart of L2 listening, presenting one of the
key challenges to success. Gaining the expertise necessary to enter a target language community “can
be emotionally trying, cognitively challenging, and interpersonally frustrating” (p. 133).
Research on anxiety in L2 listening has grown in the past decade, since Elkhafaifi (2005b) studied
the relationship between general foreign language anxiety and listening anxiety, finding them sepa-
rate but related phenomena that both have a negative effect on listening comprehension. Negative
correlations between anxiety and performance on measures of listening comprehension have been
reported by Chang (2008), Berkleyen (2009), Golchi (2012), Zhang (2013), and Brunfaut and Révész
(2015). Pae (2012) found that each of the four skills made an independent contribution to students’
foreign language anxiety, but that listening made the largest contribution.
The pedagogical question is what can be done to alleviate anxiety. Mills, Pajares and Herron
(2006) suggest that taking steps to boost learners’ self-efficacy would improve listening proficiency
and lower anxiety. Lee and Lee (2015) suggest adding a visual component to lower anxiety and raise
comprehension scores. Chang (2010) compared a class taught through extensive listening (EL) to
one taught traditionally. The EL class comprehended more than the traditional class when tested on
both narratives and dialogues, but it also scored higher in anxiety at the end of the experiment, sug-
gesting a disconnect between competence and anxiety. Chang claims that this is facilitative anxiety
or increased attention.
Graham (2006) raised the issue of the importance of motivation to listening, saying that giving
more practice to students who already find listening difficult will only demotivate. She called for
teaching students how to listen. Vandergrift (2006) argued for more research into motivation as a
potential explanation for variance in L2 listening ability.
In addition to these factors, current research in listening has often focused on the use of multi-
media, the use and teaching of strategies, reading while listening, and extensive listening. We take up
these topics next.
Listening and Multimedia

Listening input is available both aurally and visually on a variety of platforms. Addition of visuals to
sound allows learners to use paralinguistic features such as gestures to comprehend, and the role of
gestures in listening comprehension is important (Harris, 2003; Sueyoshi & Hardison, 2005).
In a review of a decade of research on the use of media in language teaching, Vanderplank (2010)
devoted a substantial portion of his text to captioning (in which the text of the audio is presented on
screen in the same language) and subtitling (in which the text is a translation of the audio). Research-
ers have found captions and subtitles useful for the development of word recognition, for compre-
hension of details, and for reducing anxiety. Some research shows that captioning is more effective
than subtitling, however (Hayati & Mohmedi, 2011). A central issue, according to Vanderplank, is
this: do captions simply allow the viewer to comprehend input that would, without the captions, be
incomprehensible, or do captions help develop listening comprehension? Research on captioning
remains very active.
Captioning helps learners do at least two things. It assists in form-meaning mapping, connecting
sounds and/or writing with meaning. It also helps learners chunk the speech stream and perhaps bet-
ter retain vocabulary (Winke, Gass & Sydorenko, 2013). Winke, Gass and Sydorenko (2013) report,
however, that languages, writing systems, content familiarity, and experience using captions in learn-
ing may all have an effect on learner performance. Proficiency levels may have an effect on caption
reliance and achievement as well (Lin, 2010; Leveridge & Yang, 2013).
Taylor (2005) reviewed a number of studies that show closed captioning of video improves lis-
tening comprehension, but not necessarily among beginners, who actually performed worse when
shown captions, perhaps because of cognitive overload. Guichon and McLornan (2008) remark that
while video provides context, it can also prove distracting, particularly when audio does not match
video.
The question of cognitive overload has been addressed by keyword captioning. The rationale
for keyword captioning is that it provides support for learners without overwhelming them with
too much information (Perez, Peters & Desmet, 2013). Hsu, Hwang, Chang and Chang (2013) and
Hsu, Hwang and Chang (2014) compared targeting specific difficult vocabulary, a form of keyword
captioning based on frequency, to full captioning. The targeted-word condition performed as well or
better than the full-captioning one. Yang and Chang (2013) measured the effects of full captioning,
keyword-only captioning, and annotated keyword captioning. The last type of captioning combined
display of a reduced form with a visual such as a yellow curve indicating linked sounds or a gray
letter showing a reduced sound. They found that annotated keyword captioning was the most effec-
tive technique of the three for both comprehension and recognition of reduced forms themselves.
Li (2014) compared an advance organizer, captioning, and a combination of advance organizer and
captioning and found no significant difference among the three experimental groups, although all
were more effective than the control condition.
Strategies
O’Malley and Chamot (1990) presented the classic division of language learning strategies into
cognitive, metacognitive, and social/affective. Vandergrift (1997) enumerated listening-specific
strategies. Field (2000) noted the confusion between learning strategies, such as note-taking and
memorization, and compensatory strategies, such as guessing words in context and circumlocution.
Berne’s (2004) review of listening strategy research concluded that more proficient listeners use
strategies more often, use a wider range of strategies, and use them interactively, in combination. Skilled
listeners were more aware of text structure and attended to larger chunks of text than did less
skilled listeners, who tended to listen word by word and rely on translation and individual key words.
Good listeners also monitored their comprehension and in the process related what they heard to
what they knew. Similarly, intermediate students in Farrell and Mallard (2006) used about three times
more strategies than did beginners, more than the advanced students. The most-used strategies in
their study of interactional listening were giving feedback to the interlocutor, hypothesis testing, and
repeating utterances from the interaction. Cai and Lee (2012) reported use of inference, the local
co-text, and background knowledge and showed that flexible use of strategies helped comprehension.
There is little evidence that most learners will develop strategy use in the absence of overt instruc-
tion (Graham, Santos & Vanderplank, 2011). There is some evidence, however, that a program that
presents strategies in a coordinated and combined fashion leads to results. Graham and Macaro
(2008) focused on teaching a set of interconnected strategies to adolescent learners: predicting, con-
firming predictions, identifying key words, inferring, recognizing familiar words, and separating the
speech stream. There were two experimental groups, which differed in the amount of scaffolding
that was provided. Both conditions were effective in increasing comprehension, compared to the
control group, and both experimental groups claimed greater self-efficacy as a result of the training.
Vandergrift and Tafaghodtari (2010) taught a group of Canadian university high beginner and lower
intermediate learners of French a process that combined and coordinated a number of strategies.
The process led to improved comprehension overall, but lower proficiency students were helped the
most. Indeed, improvement scores for higher proficiency students were not significantly different for
the experimental and control groups. Cross (2009), on the other hand, found no effect for strategy
training among his Japanese adult subjects and, in another study, an effect only for the less-skilled
listeners (Cross, 2011a).
Yeldham and Gruba (2014) claimed that instruction in bottom-up skills was ineffective. Yeldham
(2015) compared a group that was taught strategies with an “interactive” group that was taught both
strategies and bottom-up skills. The strategies-only group improved significantly in listening profi-
ciency, while the interactive group improved only a little. Both groups improved significantly on tests
of bottom-up skills like reduced speech, word recognition, and intonation.
A number of studies have followed Goh (2008) and Vandergrift and Goh (2012) in moving away
from strategy training and from thinking about metacognitive strategies in isolation to thinking
about the larger issue of metacognition and metacognitive knowledge, including personal knowledge
(knowledge of self as listener), task knowledge (understanding the nature of listening), and strategy
knowledge (knowledge of when to apply strategies). Goh and Hu (2014) report that 12–15% of the
variance in listening performance has been attributable to metacognitive awareness, measured by the
Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ; Vandergrift, Goh, Mareschal & Tafag-
hodtari, 2006). In Goh and Hu’s study, metacognitive awareness accounted for 22% of the variance.
In addition to Goh (2008) and Goh and Hu (2014), Rahimirad and Shams (2014) and Bozorgian
(2014) reported that teaching metacognitive strategies led to improved listening test scores. While
Rahimirad and Shams found that learners, in simulated recall sessions, reported using problem-
solving skills, planning, and evaluation, Bozorgian’s learners did not report significant use of meta-
cognitive strategies. He suggests that the learners might have been sufficiently proficient not to need
compensatory strategies.
Dissents about the efficacy of strategy training come from Renandya and Farrell (2010), who
believe that most teachers have neither the time nor the expertise to teach strategies effectively, and
Macaro (2006), who questions the theoretical framework of language learning strategies. He locates
strategies in working memory and believes strategies must work in clusters.
Classroom Interventions
A number of studies have investigated the combination of listening and reading, reading while
listening (RWL), to further acquisition. University students listened to texts while simultaneously
reading them. Brown, Waring and Donkaewbua (2008) found no significant gains for vocabulary
acquisition for RWL, compared to only listening or only reading. Chang (2009) and Woodall (2010)
found modest gains for comprehension in the RWL condition. Gobel and Kano (2014) reported
that RWL increased reading rate and vocabulary recognition but not general English proficiency.
Moussa-Inaty, Ayres and Sweller (2012) argued that reading while listening is redundant and cre-
ates an increased cognitive load. Learners in their study performed better on listening tasks after the
material was first presented in the read-only mode.
Reading while listening is sometimes labeled extensive listening, though in principle the two are
separate. Extensive listening focuses on students listening to a variety, and relatively large amount,
of input, often outside of class. Students need not read along. In Chang and Millet (2014), the RWL
condition was more effective than either the listen-only or read-only condition in increasing listen-
ing test scores. Partially because the students had control over their own learning, Chang and Millet
labeled their method “extensive listening.” Cross and Vandergrift (2015) pointed out that research on
extensive listening can be problematic in that it often does not control for time on task.
Nevertheless, in terms of recommendations for the classroom, Renandya and Farrell (2010) urged
adoption of an extended listening program that combines teacher dictations, teacher read-alouds,
and listening-while-reading, as well as self-directed listening and narrow/repeated listening. Their
proposals generated some controversy, particularly with respect to their allied criticism of teaching
listening strategies (Siegel, 2011; Blyth, 2012).
Future Directions
A perennial issue in the classroom has been that of teaching versus testing. Many, including Richards
(2005) and Field (2008b), have noted that classroom approaches to listening often stress the compre-
hension of a single piece of input. This is the testing of listening: how accurately can the learner com-
prehend two or three minutes of audio? However, if learners are to succeed in listening to another
language, teachers must go beyond testing to teaching, whether it be teaching learners awareness
of the bottom-up processes involved in listening (Field, 2008b), the use of metacognitive strategies
(Vandergrift & Goh, 2012), or the vocabulary and syntax used in the input (Richards, 2005).
More studies are needed on how teachers actually teach listening. For example, while comprehension-
monitoring activities accounted for a significant proportion of the listening lessons investigated by
Siegel (2014), they were accompanied by bottom-up activities, prediction activities, metacognitive
instruction, and teacher modeling. Techniques by which teachers link in-class listening skills and
strategies to possible future listening situations were relatively rare in the lessons of the 10 teachers
examined. If this sort of work is undertaken more widely, there will have to be more standardized
agreement on how to identify each activity.
Finally, much of listening research has ignored the social-cultural-historical factors (Cross, 2011b).
There has been, to be sure, recent research on pragmatic comprehension (Taguchi, 2005, 2008, 2011),
which Garcia (2004) differentiates from “linguistic comprehension.” Farrell and Mallard’s (2006)
work on interactive listening strategies is another example that takes into account the context in
which listening exists. Given its origins in psycholinguistics, however, listening research has focused
largely on trying to figure out what goes on in the listener’s head. Listening goes on between and
among people, and we need to know more about the interactions between speakers and listeners,
with a focus on listeners rather than the usual one of speakers.
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