ON LISTENING
ON LISTENING From hearing to comprehension After being on the road as an English teacher since the early seventies, which implies more than 40 years of changes, not only of books, authors, methods, but also of approaches, I have learnt that, since skills (listening, reading, writing, speaking) began to be considered separately, “listening comprehension exams” have become the most feared of all four. It must be remembered here that the student/examinee is to answer questions on an aural [1] text that, as it flies past his ears, he cannot control at all. The speed, the accent, the quality of the sound, and sometimes even physical obstacles (background noises, echoes, etc), add to the difficulty of the theoretically well conceived distracters [2] . At this point the obvious question is where does the difficulty of a listening task lie? At first sight it seems to come from the type of exer...