Issues in Second Language Listening Comprehension and the Pedagogical Implications

Listening is an important language skill to develop in terms of second language acquisition (SLA). In spite of its importance, second language (L2) learners often regard listening as the most difficult language skill to learn. This paper reviews a variety of recent research on listening comprehension to provide a basis for creating more effective listening instruction. It begins with a brief discussion of listening processes for comprehension and acquisition, followed by reviewing cognitive research, linguistic research and affective research on listening comprehension, and discusses implications of teaching L2 listening for comprehension and acquisition. The paper concludes that current research on listening comprehension has revealed the importance of metacognitive knowledge, lexical knowledge and prosodic cues including stress and intonation as well as reducing anxiety in the development listening comprehension.