Towards acquiring communicative competence

through listening
Alicia Martínez-Flor and Esther Usó-Juan

Pre-reading questions  Before you read, discuss the following:

1. How much has the view of listening changed over the past decades?
2. How much has listening instruction changed over the past decades?
3. How could you make listening instruction communicative?
4. How do you think the different components of the communicative
competence framework influence listening comprehension?

1. Introduction

Listening to a second language (L2) has been regarded as the most widely
used language skill in normal daily life (Morley 2001; Rost 2001). It in-
volves a complex process that allows us to understand and interpret spoken
messages in real time by making use of a variety of sources such as pho-
netic, phonological, prosodic, lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic
(Lynch 1998). Given the complexity that underlies this process of listening
comprehension, it has been considered the most difficult skill to learn out
of the four skills. In fact, research carried out over the last few decades on
how this skill is learned has provided insights into why listening was tradi-
tionally regarded as a passive skill with no place in L2 teaching, and how it
has been increasingly considered an important skill in its own right (Men-
delsohn 1998; Morley 2001; Vandergrift 2004). As a result of this progress,
the primacy of listening is nowadays obvious and, as such, it plays a key
role in developing learners’ L2 communicative ability.
Building on these assumptions, the purpose of the present chapter
aims first to review the changing patterns that have taken place in the
learning of listening over the past decades. It will then describe how
these changes have provided the basis for a communicative approach
to the teaching of listening. Finally, it will show how this skill can be
integrated in a communicative competence framework that will allow