Journal of English for Academic Purposes 10 (2011) 73–78

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Journal of English for Academic Purposes

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Editorial

This special issue of the Journal of English for Academic Purposes offers a ‘state of the art’ overview of second languageacademic listening. It opens with an authoritative paper by Tony Lynch, which reviews research findings since the turn ofthe millennium, relates them to their wider background and pinpoints the major issues that have arisen over the period.In doing so, Lynch rethinks established perceptions of what we understand by the term ‘academic listening’. LyndaTaylor and Ardeshir Geranpayeh consider the testing of listening for academic purposes. They offer a brief history of howit has been handled by one examination board, followed by an informed account of the principles that currently shapetest design in this area. Using Weir’s (2005) socio-cognitive framework, they propose concrete guidelines for those whoare charged with designing internal tests and need to confront issues of validity and reliability. My own paper arguesstrongly that both practitioners and testers need to discover more about the cognitive operations in which secondlanguage listeners engage during academic lectures. It provides examples of three different research approaches thatpotentially shed light on difficult-to-access processes, and draws conclusions for practice from the findings achieved.Finally, Suzanne Graham takes a new line on the teaching of strategies to academic listeners. She challenges those whoare sceptical about the value of strategy training: pointing out that, by enabling the learner to crack the code ofconnected speech at an early stage, such training boosts confidence and creates a stronger motivational stance towardsthe demands made by listening.

While there has been an upsurge of interest in recent years in second language listening as a whole, listening for academicpurposes still appears to be a neglected area (a point tellingly made by Lynch). The proposals received for this volumeobviously constitute only a small sample of current research activity; but if one can judge from them at all, much of the worktaking place seems to be focused on testing. The perspectives adopted often seem to be technical ones, of significance totesters but with limited applications for teaching programmes.We received strikingly few abstracts focussing on the effects oftraining or on the challenges faced by the academic listener. It is partly for this reason that the special issue takes the form ofa review of the field rather than a set of new research findings.

The remainder of this introduction traces themes that emerge across the four papers, provides a wider context for some ofthe discussion and identifies areas that merit further attention, in the hope that they may suggest lines of enquiry toresearchers interested in this under-researched field.

1. A neglected area

Let us first ask why academic listening does not seem to be a major priority among EAP researchers, as compared to (say)academic reading or writing. In his paper, Lynch identifies two main causes. One is the complex nature of the skill, whichdraws upon multiple sources of information (spoken input, linguistic knowledge, world knowledge, knowledge of thespeaker, recall of what has been said so far, even speech rate). The second is the difficulty of finding appropriate researchmethods that can circumvent the internalised nature of the skill in a way that is free of task effects. To these, one can adda third in the nature of the input, which (unlike that in reading) is highly variable at phoneme, word and speaker level andoffers no consistent gaps betweenwords. For researchers andmaterials designers alike, there is also a fourth in the problem ofestablishing the relative difficulty of a listening task due to the many factors that contribute: not just the phonology, lexis,syntax and pragmatics of the recording, but also its propositional density; not just the number of question items and thelocation of the information they refer to but also the method of questioning, the wording of the items and the possibleengagement of other skills.

Problematic though these considerations are, they could be said to apply to all listening research and not simply tolistening in EAP. The question remains of why an upsurge of interest in academic listening in the 1990s, which even gave riseto a themed collection of papers (Flowerdew, 1994), has not been sustained.

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2. Defining terms in academic listening

2.1. Types of input

One answer may lie in the fact that the term ‘academic listening’ has always been rather loosely conceptualised. In thisissue, Lynch argues persuasively that it should be regarded as covering two distinct types of input. What he terms one-way1

listening refers to the domain that features most commonly in EAP instruction, namely lecture listening; but also embracesconferences and other types of specialist presentation. Lynch then demonstrates that two-way listening by L2 students ismore frequent thanwe tend to assume: it occurs not only in seminars, but also in face-to-face situations such as supervisions,interviews or indeed PhD vivas. He also mentions briefly the type of social listening in which an L2 student might have toengage, entailing a two-way interaction with academics, peers (both L1 and L2 speakers) and the wider public. In short, heoffers a better-specified account of the scope of academic listening, positioning it on a gradient determined by the degree towhich the listener is able and expected to respond.

The broader relevance of the one-way/two-way distinction lies in the prevailing task conditions. In a one-way situation,the learner is not under time pressure to assemble a response; but there exist other challenges in a) the fact that the speakercannot normally be interrupted with a request for an explanation and b) the cognitive demands of listening in conjunctionwith reading visual material and writing notes. Conversely, in the two-way situation, there is opportunity to repaira breakdown of understanding, but it is combined with time constraints on responding.

Taylor andGeranpayeh also raise the issue of the different types of input towhich an academic listener is likely to be exposed.They mention four additional scales in the Common European Framework at C1 and C2 level, which distinguish betweenunderstanding conversation between native speakers, listening as a member of a live audience, listening to announcements andinstructions and listening to audiomedia and recordings. They concede thatwork needs to bedone onfleshingout the categories inorder to provide clear guidelines for teachers, testers and researchers; and draw attention to the fact that the population in anEnglish-speaking university is these days likely to include many non-native interlocutors as well as native ones.

A second problematic area for EAP listening researchers has been the vexed question of whether generalisations can bemade about the discourse structure of academic presentations. Can the academic lecture be described as a ‘genre’? The viewthat it can is implicit in some of the studies in the 1994 collection referred to above; though even there a thoughtful paper byDudley Evans strikes a different note: suggesting that ‘students and ESP lecturers need to be aware of the different frame-works and narratives that different disciplines use’ (Dudley-Evans, 1994, p. 146). More recent thinking seems to haveembraced a view that the discourse structure and means of presentation adopted by a lecturer are often a reflection of thenature of the discipline and the types of analysis and argumentation that it favours. Thus, Rowley-Jolivet’s (2002) majoranalysis of visual input, reported in Lynch’s paper, was careful to focus on three domains with certain similarities of content.

The question of cross-disciplinary differences is obviously a potential headache for testers when choosing recordedmaterial for high-stakes tests that may determine university admission. Taylor and Geranpayeh take the issue further andwonder whether it might even be the case that different disciplines demand different levels of listening proficiency by virtueof the instructional path they favour.

2.2. Defining successful academic listening

Another question that has not been fully resolved is how academic listening differs qualitatively from general listening. Inclaiming to treat it as a separate phenomenon, we need to know rather more about the processes in which a listener engageswhen listening to a specialist lecture or participating in a seminar, and to demonstrate that they are different in kind fromthose employed during a non-academic speech event. As Lynch reports, Buck and Tatsuoka (1998) identified a set of attributeswhich accounted for nearly all the variance in performance of a group of Japanese college students; but it is striking howmany of these apply to all listening events and not specifically academic ones. Field in this issue attempts to shed some lighton the processes adopted in academic listening. Drawing upon a cognitive model of the skill, the article suggests that it isespecially at the higher levels, involving meaning construction and information handling, that the academic listener is likelyto face greater demands than the generalist.

There is, of course, a line of thought that characterises the listening construct in terms of the sub-skills that contribute to it;and it is significant that, in his early taxonomy of such sub-skills, Richards (1983) proposed a separate and distinct list foracademic listening.2 The sub-skills approach has for some time provided a set of pegs on which parts of an EAP listeningprogramme can be hung (Beglar &Murray, 2009; Lynch, 2004); but it remains open to challenge (Field, 2008, pp. 105–8; Rost,1990, pp. 150–1). Some commentators have questioned whether these intuitive categories have psychological reality; but themost persistent question is whether they are so closely interconnected that it is not helpful to separate them out for individualpractice. Here, even recent studies such as Song (2008), using structural equation modelling, have produced mixed findings.

1 Thus avoiding the potentially confusing terms interactional (also used by discourse analysts as the converse of transactional) and interactive (also usedby cognitive psychologists to refer to the use of multiple cues when matching spoken input to words).

2 Though, as Taylor and Geranpayeh indicate, the sub-skills cited were restricted to those associated with lecture listening and do not include the types ofcontext that Lynch characterises as two-way.

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A further area of doubt, as Taylor and Geranpayeh point out, concerns whether sub-skills can be operationalised in theform of test methods or items that tap unambiguously into sub-components of the overall construct. An alternative to sub-skills, they suggest, can be found in the ‘Can Do’ descriptors of the Common European Common Framework (Council ofEurope, 2001), which provide an agreed system of reference points for teachers and testers alike. At the same time, theyrecognise that the present descriptors are as yet by no means extensive or precise enough to provide a clearcut set ofparameters. Other concerns are the difficulty of calibrating existing tests and skills programmes against the descriptors; thishas been the subject of recent research, some of it psychometric and some of it (most prominently, the English Profile project)seeking to characterise performance at the different levels. For the moment, the descriptors remain, like sub-skills, theproduct of intuition, with their wording susceptible to varying interpretations by commentators and practitioners.

In general listening studies, there has beenmuch recent interest in the strategieswhich learners employ to compensate fortheir incomplete linguistic knowledge or limited L2 listening expertise. The work of researchers such as Vandergrift and Gohhas placed quite heavy emphasis on the part played by metacognitive strategies relating to planning and organisinga listening event (Goh, 1997; Vandergrift, 2003). For a perceptive review of the field, see Graham, Macaro, and Vanderplank(2007). A major reservation, recognised by Goh herself, is that metacognitive strategies such as preparing to listen, inten-tionally listening for main points etc., are very useful in a classroom context but less applicable to general real-world listening.However, the reverse would appear to be true in the case of a one-way mode such as lecture listening, where achievinga mental set before the lecture, listening for main points, structuring information during note-taking etc are invaluable studyskills and often taught as such. The paper by Graham in this issue adds to the discussion. Drawing upon evidence from a rangeof non-EAP contexts, Graham argues that strategy training does more than providing listeners with a set of expedients thatenable them to succeed in tests and make sense of recorded material. It also enhances their self-efficacy, a combination ofmotivation and confidence which is especially valuable for those who are going on to face the daunting task of listening tolectures or participating in other types of academic discourse.

3. Two broad research traditions

3.1. Input-based

As Lynch indicates in his review, there have been two broad traditions in the study of academic listening: one investigatingthe nature of the input, especially at discourse level; and one exploring what the listener manages to extract from it. In the1990s, the first became rather dependent upon the notion (already discussed) that the academic lecturemight possess certaingeneric features independently of the discipline being taught. In addition, early discourse-based approaches tended to focuson linguistic and discoursal features of the message (especially in the form of discourse markers) and ignore the nature of themodality in which the message was transmitted. Researchers at this time had few qualms about basing their studies on read-aloud scriptedmini-lectures – and even inmanipulating the scripts to include or exclude cues thatmight normally be present.Clearly, this gave rise to recordings that were phonologically, stylistically and structurally different from normal lecturerdelivery, raising questions about how reliably the data obtained could shed light on the way in which academic listenersprocess input in normal circumstances.3 The Hansen & Jensen paper in the 1994 collection stands out from several others byarguing persuasively for the use of authentic recordings in EAP teaching and research. Of course, the use of suchmaterial addsto the researcher’s headaches by introducing additional variables to control for. Taylor and Geranpayeh point out problems fortesters too in that a natural text may not contain sufficient density of information to provide enoughmaterial for itemwriting.

Another feature of early discourse-based approaches was a tendency to analyse transcripts as text without takingadequate account of their phonological characteristics (not least, the relative prominence of different pieces of information).Without question, studying discourse patterns bymeans of a written transcript is a useful way of achieving an understandingof the linguistic and conceptual content with which a listener has to cope; but it does not of itself provide an account of whatthe signal reaching the listener actually sounds like (which parts are salient andwhich are not) or of what the listener actuallydoes with the content when exposed to it. The best one can do is to infer which linguistic aspects may assist a listener andwhich are likely to prove problematic. Here, the agenda has certainly moved on and it is noteworthy that the two recentdiscourse studies discussed here by Lynch (Thompson, 2003 and Pickering, 2004) concern themselves very specifically withthe effects on students of the phonological characteristics of academic lectures. This is welcome evidence that the discoursetradition now takes greater account of the nature of themedium. Of course, it also contributes to the perception that academiclistening research is ‘difficult’ in that it adds to the areas of expertise in which a researcher has to be competent.

3.2. Listener based

The other approach has investigated listening from the perspective of the listener. At its simplest, it might base itsconclusions on measures of comprehension: seeking, for example, correlations between listening test scores and scores forlanguage knowledge (Mecartty, 2000; Vandergrift, 2006). However, it is precarious to assume that test scores provide

3 Except, of course, in cultures (and some academic conferences) that favour read-aloud lectures.

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unqualified indications of listening proficiency, given the variables associated with task type and item focus that are mentionedin Taylor and Geranpayeh’s paper. Increasingly, researchers have extended their enquiry to the attitudes and behaviour thatunderlie these outcomes. Lynch mentions a number of areas inwhich listener beliefs have been explored: including the role ofnote-taking, sources of perceived difficulty in academic listening and impressions as to lecturer speech rate.

A different line of attack has investigated the nature of listening expertise. Which processes characterise the listening of anexpert lecture listener? In what ways does the lecture listening of an inexperienced L2 listener differ from those of a fullycompetent one? This is the background to Field’s paper, which first explores howmuch ‘bottom up’ information from input islikely to be available to a middle range academic listener and consequently how reliant such a listener is upon externalknowledge to compensate for gaps in understanding. It then goes on to examine a set of verbal reports which indicate howlisteners actually perform under the conditions associated with certain conventional types of listening task. How much ofwhat they do represents the lecture listening construct and how much loads on to loopholes in test format?

At issue here is what is termed cognitive validity. This concept (Glaser, 1991) relates to the extent towhich a test can be saidto elicit from a candidate the cognitive processes associated with real-world use of the construct being tested. For example,does a test of science require a candidate to demonstrate scientific thinking or can the candidatemeet its requirements simplyby reciting facts? The notion of cognitive validity was first applied to language learning by Weir (2005); and has made animportant contribution to recent validation exercises conducted by Cambridge ESOL on its own suite of exams. It hasparticular relevance when evaluating the predictive power of high-stakes tests: in an academic context, whether a test oflistening can be regarded as requiring the type of cognitive behaviour that a candidate would engage in when attendinga lecture in the target language (Field, 2009). Unsurprisingly, Taylor and Geranpayeh dedicate a section of their paper to theconcept, drawing attention to the way it has edged the thinking of certain test providers towards listening-into-writing andlistening-into-speaking tests.

A related concept is that of cognitive load, or the relative complexity of the mental operations imposed upon a listener bya particular task or item. It receives mention by both Taylor and Geranpayeh and Field when considering the effects upon anEAP listener of what effectively constitute divided attention tasks (Kahneman, 1973). Taylor and Geranpayeh draw attentionto the increased cognitive demands imposed by requiring a test taker to record answers while at the same time continuingto listen. In turn, Field cites testimony from verbal reports of the disproportionate demands associated with what issometimes thought of as the most ecological of academic listening tasks – namely gap filling. The reasons appear to besimple: it requires the listener to manipulate not two but three different language skills (listening, reading and writing) intandem.

4. Research areas of interest

Which research areas emerge in this special issue as of current interest, and how do they compare with those of the past –for example, those exemplified in the 1994 collection? There clearly have been some shifts of focus. Certain long-establishedissues such as the discourse structure of the lecture and the effects of topic knowledge on understanding appear to have givenway to new concerns. Others, however, perhaps because they were never fully explored as research topics, continue to attractinterest. They include the function of note-taking and the relationship between listening proficiency and linguistic knowl-edge, including the learner’s lexical repertoire.

A brief glance at the four papers that follow suggests a number of relatively new areas that have come to the fore.

Lecturer characteristics. An aspect of speaker variability that appears to be of great current concern is accent. Taylor andGeranpayeh note that, from an international testing perspective, a balance needs to be struck: featuring a representativerange of varieties without disadvantaging test takers who have had more limited exposure to speakers of English. Boththey and Lynch recognise the important role played in an academic context by second language varieties. The occurrenceof those varieties is not confined to the student’s peers and social interaction: with the increasing globalisation ofacademic recruitment, lecturers too may well be L2 speakers. Lynch cites an interesting example of a study of the use ofEnglish as an academic lingua franca in a Swedish institution, where the variety in question is actually the listeners’ own.With the growth of interest in CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) in certain countries, an important futureissue will be the extent to which the use of English impedes comprehensibility for students, as compared with attendinglectures by the same lecturers in their L1.

A further aspect of speaker variation touched upon in the issue – and one that has been largely neglected by researchers –is the need of L2 lecture listeners to normalise to the voice and speech rate of the speaker. Taylor and Geranpayeh note thatthis consideration leads testers to employ easier items in the early stages of lower level tests.

Lecturing style. Investigations into the nature of academic listening not only assist EAP practitioners in targeting listeningskills training more effectively; they also provide insights of value to those who lecture to groups that consist partly orlargely of second language listeners. In an important article, Lynch (1994) drew attention to the many implications ofacademic listening research for subject lecturers unfamiliar with EAP and often equipped with little awareness of thecultural and conceptual difficulties of second language students. His paper in this issue extends that analysis in the light ofthe shift in many parts of the world towards a lecture style which engages individual learners more actively. There isemerging evidence (Morell, 2007) that this more interactive type of lecture makes subject matter more accessible to non-

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native listeners. The next stage will hopefully be an increasing reliance by lecturers on discovery techniques which obligeL1 and L2 students alike to engage fully with tasks and issues in their discipline before the lecturer goes on to discusspossible solutions.

Multimodality. There has been growing interest in the multimodal nature of academic listening. Clearly, in a real-worldlecture context, a listener has access to visual as well as audio sources of information. They include the lecturer’s facialexpressions and gestures but also graphic and written input in the form of handouts and PowerPoint slides. The presence ofthese cues to understanding is discussed in three of the four papers in this issue. Both Taylor and Geranpayeh and Fieldrecognise that they can bring problems as well as benefits to the academic listener. On the one hand, they can supplyimportant gaps where listening has failed; on the other, they set up multiple demands upon a listener’s attention which (asdiscussed earlier) create the danger of cognitive overload. Lynch mentions this as a promising area of research (‘the inter-relationship between the four elements of delivery. – spoken input, written input, image and body language – is territory tobe explored’). He also argues that in future it will become increasingly difficult to defend the use of audio rather than videomaterial in international tests of academic listening.

Autonomy and the role of technology. Mention of technological advances occurs from time to time in the issue. A sub-text, not explicitly discussed, is that more sophisticated equipment and methods of recording (not to mention theexplosion of audio and video resources on the internet) mean that the possibilities for autonomous listening practice havegreatly increased. Listening expertise is very much an individual matter in that a section of text that causes problems toone listener in a group may be completely accessible to another. An increasing reliance on self-study would thereforeseem to be the right direction for listening instruction to take in the future. But again, if we are to guide these auton-omous listeners, we badly need good quality research into how they perform, both within lectures and in the specialcircumstances of a study centre.

Listening strategies. Strategies are mentioned at various points in the issue, and indeed form the topic of Graham’spaper. Field signals the importance of distinguishing between task-wise strategies which exploit the weaknesses ofa particular listening task format and others that might be of use to learners in the real-world circumstances of a lecture.The former perhaps play too great a role in many pre-sessional EAP programmes, with a view to ensuring examinationsuccess. As previously noted, listening strategies have been quite extensively studied over the past 15 years; however,very little of the research has specifically focused on those that are specific to academic listening. There are also, asGraham notes, questions to be explored concerning the effectiveness of strategy instruction. Such instruction is incor-porated into many EAP courses, but it is noticeable that most of the studies which she cites relating to self-efficacy aredrawn from other contexts.

Here, then, are a few pointers for future researchers. Some of the areas outlined (multi-modality, the effect of differentvarieties upon intelligibility and comprehensibility) already have a respectable body of research behind them; others arerelatively unexplored. It is my hope as guest editor that this special issue will serve to revive interest in the intriguing andcomplex area of academic listening, will challenge a few received assumptions and will set some new ideas in train forpractitioners, researchers and testers alike.

References

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Academic listening (pp. 146–158). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Field, J. (2008). Listening in the language classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Field, J. (2009). The cognitive validity of the lecture listening paper in the IELTS test. In P. Thompson (Ed.), IELTS research papers 9. London: British Council.Flowerdew, J. (Ed.). (1994). Academic listening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Glaser, R. (1991). Expertise and assessment. In M. C. Wittrock, & E. L. Baker (Eds.), Testing and cognition (pp. 17–30). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Goh, C. (1997). Metacognitive awareness and second language listeners. ELT Journal, 51, 361–369.Graham, S., Macaro, E., & Vanderplank, R. (2007). A review of listening strategies: focus on sources of knowledge and on success. In A. D. Cohen, & E. Macaro

(Eds.), Language learner strategies: 30 years of research and practice (pp. 165–185). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Hansen, C., & Jensen, C. (1994). Evaluating lecture comprehension. In J. Flowerdew (Ed.), Academic listening (pp. 241–268). Cambridge: Cambridge University

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Press.Mecartty, F. M./ (2000). Lexical and grammatical knowledge in reading and listening comprehension by foreign language learners of Spanish. Applied

Language Learning, 7, 323–348.Morell, T. (2007). What enhances EFL students’ participation in lecture discourse? Student, lecturer and discourse perspectives. Journal of English for

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19–43.Richards, J. C. (1983). Listening comprehension: approach, design, procedure. TESOL Quarterly, 17, 219–240.Rost, M. (1990). Listening in language learning. Harlow: Longman.Rowley-Jolivet, E. (2002). Visual discourse in scientific conference papers. A genre-based study. English for Specific Purposes, 21(1), 19–40.

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Thompson, S. (2003). Intonation and the signalling of organisation in academic talks. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 2, 5--20.Vandergrift, L. (2003). Orchestrating strategy use: toward a model of the skilled second language listener”. Language Learning, 53, 463–496.Vandergrift, L. (2006). Second language listening: listening ability or language proficiency? Modern Language Journal, 90, 6–18.Weir, C. (2005). Language testing and validation: An evidence-based approach. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

John FieldCRELLA, University of Bedfordshire, UK

Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UKE-mail address: jcf1000@dircon.co.uk