Dimensions of

Academic Listening
John Flowerdew and Lindsay Miller
What is Academic Listening?

• Academic listening is “the processing of spoken language in academic

contexts.” It can involve comprehension of knowledge and information
transmitted through lectures, tutorials, seminars and informational
media. It may also entail knowledge and understanding of attitudes,
beliefs, values, and culture.
 Conceptual Underpinnings of Academic
Listening
Academic listening comes from various researches on listening, such as:
• Psychometric research into listening – study on speech rate and
pausology, foreign accent, etc.
• Discourse analysis researches which focused on lexical phrases, discourse
patterns in talks, slang expressions etc.
• Research on linguistic strategies –
• Ethnographic research into academic listening
 • L2 listeners belong to a community of learners; in
their academic lectures, they are being initiated
into a community of practice.
Premises of • Students’ comprehension of a given lecture is
based not only on their level of language skill but
the Models also on their previous learning experiences.
• Lecturers’ negative expectations of L2 students’
for linguistic ability and their attempts to address this
may have the adverse consequence of having the

Lecturing
students rely on the notes alone and cease to pay
attention to the lecture.
• Lecturers need to create a bridge between the
in L2 students’ community of learners and the
community of practice into which they are
initiating students such that a new community of
learning is created.
Pedagogical Model for Listening
Listening Based on the Model is. . .
• Individualized. Each has his/her own way of listening.
• Cross-cultural. Cultural background affects one’s listening comprehension.
• Social. Listening is interactive.
• Affective. Listeners are influenced by their motivations, beliefs, & attitude.
• Contextualized. Listener is integrated with other language activities.
• Strategic. Different strategies work for different learners.
• Intertextual. Previous linguistic experiences affect our L2 listening
comprehension.
• Critical. Active listeners evaluate what they have heard or listened to.
Rationale for Teaching Listening

“By guiding students towards independently recognising the tools

available to aid them in the decoding of a message, students can begin to
question and experiment with their own listening process, fine-tuning
their reactions to oral input in order to maximise upon the level of
comprehension gained.” (Walker, 2014)
Rationale for Teaching Listening

“Textbooks are in fact not sufficiently applying the theoretical findings

[of current research]” (Mendelsohn 1998:95), with most doing “very
little to develop metacognitive knowledge through raising learners'
consciousness of listening processes. [Therefore,] It is imperative [for
teachers] to teach students how to listen” (Vandergrift 2002) through
raising students’ awareness of listening strategies.
Future Trends
• New media have posed new challenges and opportunities for L2
learners. The traditional activities like filling the information gap can
easily be done with the new technology. But these new media have also
developed a different kind of learners whose motivations to listen vary
across time and space. Therefore, teachers have to continue researching
and innovating not only to come up with authentic materials but to
make learning relevant to the students as well.
Reflection Questions
• Is academic Listening different from everyday listening?
• In your teaching context, what listening problems do your students
often struggle with?
• In what way/s do the eight dimensions to the proposed pedagogical
model enhance the more traditional top-down and bottom-up
approaches to listening?
• Which of the dimensions in the pedagogical model would it be easy to
develop materials for, and which might be more difficult? Why?
References
Flowerdew, John & Miller, Lindsay. (2014). Dimensions of Academic Listening. In Celce-
Murcia, M. Brinton, D., & Snow, M.A. eds. Teaching English for second or foreign
language. Australia: Heile, Cengage Learning.

Walker, Natasha. (2014). Listening the Most Difficult Skill to Teach. Encuentro, 23, pp167-
175.