0.Introduction

As my regular readers would know, Steve Smith and I are currently in the process of writing a book on aural instruction. This has involved reviewing a vast amount of research on the various areas of listening pedagogy in the last year or so. In this post, I will concisely discuss eight sets of research findings I have come across, that I believe every modern language instructor should be aware of and have had a transformative impact on my teaching.

1. Anxiety seriously affects listening comprehension (Elkhafaifi, 2005; Lund, 1991; Vogely, 1998; Graham, 2011; Vaefee, 2016)

Psychologists distinguish between three types of anxiety: trait, state and situation specific (Vafaee, 2016).  Foreign Language Anxiety or FLA, is a well-documented phenomenon which refers to what psychologists MacIntyre and Gardner (1991) describe as ‘situation specific’ anxiety or “the feeling of tension and apprehension specifically associated with second language context, including speaking…