Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research

a National Language Resource Center

Listening Comprehension in
Foreign Language Instruction

by
Rumia Ableeva
The Pennsylvania State University

October 2008
CALPER Professional Development Document
CPDD 0810

Professional Development Document

Listening Comprehension in Foreign Language Instruction*1

Rumia Ableeva
The Pennsylvania State University

Abstact

This document addresses a range of theoretical and practical issues concerned with the teaching
of listening comprehension, a crucial component of foreign language instruction. More specifi-
cally, it addresses the following questions: 1) what is listening comprehension? and 2) how can
we teach our students to be effective listeners? To address these questions, we begin with an
overview of what we know about the processes involved in listening comprehension and review
the most prominent models of listening comprehension, i.e. bottom-up, top-down and interac-
tive. Next we present a model of L2 listening comprehension which primarily involves bottom-
up/top-down/interactive processes but also includes individual, social and cultural dimensions.
Finally, we examine three major approaches to listening comprehension instruction, i.e. discrete-
point, integrative and communicative, and discuss how foreign language teachers can make
sound pedagogical choices about how to teach and assess their students’ listening comprehen-
sion.

What do we currently know about listening comprehension?

In language pedagogy, text comprehension has always been a central aspect of listen-
ing and reading instruction. Over the last several decades comprehension research has
yielded several models that have attempted to explain the process involved in both
reading and listening comprehension. Written and spoken texts require the same pro-
cessing, i.e. to understand a text readers and listeners must activate their linguistic as
well as prior knowledge of the world. However, when listening to oral texts, listen-
ers deal with a number of features unique to spoken discourse only, i.e. sound modi-
fication, prosodic characteristics (e.g. stress, intonation), hesitations, the involuntary
breaks, ellipses, redundancy, the grammatical reconstruction of utterances, repetitions
and corrections etc. (e.g. Kinginger, 1998; Rost, 2002; Buck, 2003). The most widely
known text comprehension processing models are bottom-up, top-down and interactive.
The bottom-up model of listening comprehension, developed in the 1940s and 1950s, in-
volves the ability to recognize the linguistic features of the language. That is, the bottom-
up model is based on the L2 learners’ knowledge of the language itself (words, syn-
tax, grammar) and the ability to use that knowledge to process the information in texts.

The top-down model of listening comprehension contends that the decoding of

verbal messages depends more on listeners’ prior knowledge of the world and/or the
topic of the text than on knowledge of the language itself or its acoustic signals (Bern-
hardt, 1991; Carell, Devine, Eskey, 1991; Swaffar Arens, & Byrnes ,1991; Kern, 2000, Buck,

* This Professional Development Document was produced with funds from a grant awarded to CALPER by the U.S. Department of
Education (CFDA 84.229, P229A060003). However, the contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Educa-
tion, and one should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.

1 Please cite as: Ableeva, R. (2008). Listening comprehension in foreign language instruction. (CALPER Professional Development Docu-
ment 0810). University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University, Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and
Research.
 2 Ableeva

2003; Flowerdew & Miller, 2005). In this regard, schema theory attempts to explain how
prior knowledge, or schemata, proposed by Rumelhart and Ortony (1977), aids in text
comprehension. According to Rumelhart and Ortony, schemata are structures that are
stored in memory and represent knowledge of events that repeatedly occurred in indi-
viduals’ previous cognitive experience, e.g. going to a grocery store, being in an airport
or checking in to a hotel. As soon as the structures of a particular event are “stored as
a schema in memory, it aids individuals in negotiating future events, in allowing them
to predict what is likely to happen” (Flowerdew & Miller, 2005, p. 26). In terms of lis-
tening comprehension, Buck (2003) similarly explains that in many cases listeners are
able to foresee the meaning of a word before deciphering its phonemes and, being in-
volved in a concrete situation, they can anticipate, using their prior knowledge, what
they will hear. Thus, text comprehension depends on L2 listeners’/readers’ familiarity
with the topic of the text and whether or not they share the same previous knowledge
with the person producing a spoken or written message (Bernhardt, 1991; Kern, 2000).

Since listening comprehension is a complex multidimensional process in

which many factors come into play, the interactive model of text comprehension ar-
gues that learners employ their prior contextual knowledge (top-down process) as
well as their L2 knowledge (bottom-up process). Thus, both text processing models
are called for if we are to view text comprehension as an interactive process. In this
fashion, Rost (2002) explains how these two processes operate in listeners as follows:

Speech perception and word recognition are the ‘bottom-up’ processes in listening: they
provide the ‘data’ for comprehension. If the listener does not recognize enough of these
bottom-up cues in order to process the speech in real time, he or she will rely more exclu-
sively on ‘top-down’ processes semantic expectations and generalizations. (Bold in the
original, p. 96)

Rost (2002) also provides a definition of text comprehension which integrates both of
the text processing models and which nicely summarizes the present discussion on this
complex process:

Comprehension is the process of relating language to concepts in one’s memory and to ref-
erences in the real world. Comprehension is the sense of understanding what the language
used refers to in one’s experience or in the outside world. ‘Complete comprehension’ then
refers to the listener having a clear concept in memory for every referent used by speaker.
(p. 59)

Instructionally, language pedagogy acknowledges that listening comprehension is

a complex ability in which bottom-up and top-down processes are involved. These
processes occur concurrently and actively interact with one another. Our discus-
sion now moves to a model of second language listening comprehension that ac-
counts for both bottom-up and top-down processes while also incorporating so-
cial or socio-cultural dimensions involved in the listening comprehension process.
 CALPER Professional Development Document No. 0810 3

A model of second language listening comprehension

Flowerdew and Miller (2005) present a cognitive model of the L2 listening process and
recommend that language educators use it as a pedagogical tool while designing listening
activities in a learner-centered setting. Figure 1 represents Flowerdew and Miller’s model:

DIMENSIONS
Individualized
Critical Cross-cultural

PROCESSES
Bottom-up processing
Intertextual Top-down processing Social
Interactive processing

Strategic Affective
Contextualized

Figure 1: A model of second language listening comprehension

(Flowerdew & Miller, 2005, p.86)

In addition to the core processes which are at the heart of this model, it includes eight dimen-
sions that “may affect the way messages are perceived and processed” (Flowerdew & Miller,
2005, p. 28). The authors argue that these additional factors define more accurately the com-
plex processes of L2 listening comprehension. These dimensions are briefly outlined below.

The individualized dimension opens up the possibility of accounting for indi-

vidual variation in text processing and offers L2 teachers the possibility to be more
sensitive to learner’s needs. For example, teachers must recognize that L2 nov-
ice listeners (or readers) need first of all to develop bottom-up skills whereas in-
termediate or advanced learners may concentrate their efforts on developing top-
down skills, while at the same time continuing to improve their bottom-up skills.

The cross-cultural dimension provides instructors with the opportunity to account

for differences in cultural interpretations of texts. These differences are due to the L2
learners’ schemata and background knowledge acquired in their L1 community. Flow-
erdew and Miller point out that cultural and age/sex/social group differences may cause
dissimilar expectations and interpretations of a given text, specifically in L2 situations.

The social dimension views the listening comprehension process as a social activ-
ity. Flowerdew and Miller state that the bottom-up text processing model presents lis-
tening mainly as a psychoperceptual process and fails to take into account interactive
dialogues (or conversations) that routinely occur between interlocutors in the real world.
They see conversations as “a very social activity, in which both speaker and hearer af-
fect the nature of the message” (p.89). They note, however, that “although conversations
 4 Ableeva

are a special case “for the social dimension of listening, that dimension is in fact pres-
ent, to a greater or lesser degree, in all types of listening, even in monologue” (p.89).

In relation to the contextualized dimension, Flowerdew and Miller claim that in

real-life situations, the listening process is always accompanied by various activi-
ties that facilitate comprehension. For example, educational settings often require
students to listen to a lecturer, to look at visual aids etc., or before a class, they may
be assigned to read some materials related to the topic at hand. In this regard, in-
structionally it is important for teachers to emphasize the contextualized dimension
for L2 settings in order to avoid situations in which decontextualized listening will
most certainly impede comprehension because it represents “unnatural listening”.

The affective dimension encompasses variables influencing the process of language

learning in general, and listening comprehension in particular. Following Mathhewson’s
(1985) affective model for reading, Flowerdew and Miller consider four variables: attitude,
motivation, affect, and physical feeling. The attitude variable consists of learners’ positive
attitude toward listening and to the source of the listening material; the motivation vari-
able involves learners’ curiosity, competence, achievement, esteem, desires to know and
to understand, as well as aesthetic appreciation; the affect variable is unstable in terms
of duration and relates to feelings (e.g. moods, sentiment, emotion etc.) that influence
someone’s decision to listen or not to listen to a text; physical feeling comprises two com-
ponents: unfavorable conditions (e.g. background noises) that might affect feelings and
the text itself which might provoke positive or negative physical feelings (e.g. the feeling
of pleasure/sadness from an enjoyable/tragic story). Two supplementary variables that
account only for L2 listening situations are also included in the model: the physical pres-
ence of speaker and the learning goal in listening which in turn includes two elements, i.e.
learners’ willingness to understand verbal messages and above all learners’ willingness
to develop listening abilities in order to achieve a higher level of language proficiency.

The strategic dimension includes language awareness and learning strategies. Flow-
erdew and Miller propose that teachers explicitly teach strategies that will support the
development of listening abilities.

The intertextual dimension is grounded in Bakhtin’s (cited in Flowerdew &

Miller, 2005) concept of intertextuality. This dimension is primarily focused on lin-
guistic relations existing among texts in terms of the notions of register and genre
into L2 listening comprehension. Different registers and genres have their own con-
tinuously repeated patterns of language use or intertextuality. Flowerdew and
Miller admit that “in this respect the notion of intertextuality is similar to that of
schemata, although the latter [schemata] are concerned with more than just lan-
guage” (p. 94) but patterns of language used by social groups for specific purposes.

The critical dimension characterizes texts as social artifacts created by members of

a particular society whose relations are affected by inequalities in power. Therefore, text
comprehension, in particular listening comprehension, becomes a political activity be-
 CALPER Professional Development Document No. 0810 5

cause all texts are colored with ideologies of individuals who produced those texts. Such
an approach to text comprehension requires the ability to analyze a text in context and
to decode the ideologies embedded in it. Flowerdew and Miller admit that the critical
dimension can be implemented only at an advanced level. In their view, this dimen-
sion decreases the degree of trivialization which often accompanies L2 language learn-
ing and prepares students to be active, engaged and responsible members of society.

Flowerdew and Miller point out that the three core processes of their listening
comprehension model should unquestionably be taken into consideration by L2 in-
structors and listening test developers, but the application of the eight dimensions
are optional and may vary depending on the goal of each particular listening activity.
Our discussion now turns to approaches to listening comprehension instruction and
assessment practices developed by the field of L2 pedagogy over the last fifty years.

Approaches to teaching and assessing L2 listening comprehension

Three major approaches that have influenced language pedagogy over the last five
decades are: the discrete-point approach, the integrative approach, and the commu-
nicative approach (Buck: 2003). In retrospect, it is not surprising that these three ap-
proaches continue to exert influence on the teaching of listening comprehension.

The discrete-point approach

The discrete-point approach appeared in the 1950s when the field of language
pedagogy was dominated by the audio-lingual method. The discrete-point ap-
proach emphasized the identification of isolated linguistic elements. The most
common types of listening tasks developed within the discrete-point ap-
proach are phonemic discrimination, paraphrase recognition and response evaluation.

Phonemic discrimination tasks are phonemic discrimination exercis-

es that usually include a task whereby students listen to a series of isolat-
ed words or sentences and then indicate what sounds or words they have just
heard. Usually, phonemic discrimination tasks focus on minimal pairs and stu-
dents are expected to identify the sounds and/or words they hear. For example,

Example 1:
Cochez la phrase entendue. Ecoutez:
Circle the sentence that you hear. Listen:
1. Elle est pure. / Elle est pour.
2. Tu es sûr. / Tu es sourd.
(from Phonétique, 350 exercices, Abry and Chalaron, 1994, p. 31)

Example 2:
Choose the words with the [p] sound in them:
Pen Ben
Ball Paul
Bat Pat
 6 Ableeva

(Flowerdew & Miller, 2005, p.199)

Today phonemic discrimination tasks are considered to be “unnatural” since students

are typically expected to listen to longer texts, not isolated sentences. However, de-
spite their unpopularity, this type of task is still valuable if some sounds of the new
language are absent from the learners’ first language (e.g. English does not differentiate
between the sounds [u] and [y] or Japanese does not distinguish between /l/ and /r/).

Paraphrase recognition tasks require listeners to reformulate what they hear. For ex-
ample, listeners are expected to select the reformulated sentence that is the closest to the
sentence they heard.

Example 3:
Learners hear:
Mary asked her mother for some money to go to the cinema.
Learners read and choose the form:
a. Mary wanted money to buy some new clothes.
b. Mary wanted to see a movie so she asked for some money.
c. Mary asked her mother to go with her to the cinema.
(Flowerdew & Miller, 2005, p.199)

In response evaluation tasks, listeners typically hear a question and are expected to select
the most appropriate answer

Example 4:
Learners hear:
- How much time did you spend in Boston?
Learners read:
(a)Yes, I did. (c) Yes, I had to
(b) Almost $ 250 (d) About four days

(Buck, 2003, p. 65)

This response evaluation listening task presupposes that students can provide a correct
answer only if they know the expression how much time and are able to pick it out from
the string of words they heard.

While the essential ideas of the discrete-point approach are to assess one small part
of a decontextualized utterance, examples 2 and 3 demonstrate that such listening tasks
actually assess a number of discrete-points. Contemporary views on listening instruction
argue that the decontextualized utterances widely used in discrete-point tasks ignore the
redundancy of spoken language and the context of communication which provides lis-
teners with helpful information for making inferences about what they hear (Buck, 2003).

The integrative approach

In the early 1970s, there was a shift to an integrative approach which builds on the assump-
tion that more than one element of listening should be assessed at a time. Oller (1979), de-
 CALPER Professional Development Document No. 0810 7

fines integrative tasks as “any procedure or task that causes the learner to process sequences
of elements in a language that conform to the normal contextual constraints of that lan-
guage” (Oller, 1979, p. 38, as cited in Buck, 2003, p. 67). Thus, the integrative tasks highlight
language processing whereas discrete-point tasks assess individual elements of language.
The types of tasks used in the integrative approach to listening instruction are dictation,
sentence repetition activities, fill-in-the-gap, statement evaluation and translation (Buck, 2003).

Dictation tasks are the most representative technique associated with the in-
tegrative approach. Within this approach, dictation is viewed as language process-
ing that assess learners’ performance at the phonological, syntactic and semantic lev-
els and in this sense they are integrative (Oller, 1979). The task procedures usually
require learners to listen to a text twice and to write down segments of the text they
hear. The most obvious problem with dictation tasks is that they do not measure
the ability to comprehend the text, but instead test listening on two relatively nar-
row levels: if the listeners are presented with short segments of a text, then listen-
ing is reduced to the word recognition level; if the listeners are exposed to long seg-
ments, then, in this case, comprehension of the linguistic level is assessed (Buck, 2003).

Sentence repetition tasks are a variation of dictation, but in this case listeners
are required to retell segments of the text instead of writing it down. Typically dur-
ing the task procedures, listeners repeat a decontextualized sentence that they hear
only once. Their responses are tape-recorded in order to be scored later. The sentence
repetition task is useful with illiterate learners or learners whose writing skills are
not yet fully developed (e.g. children). However neither dictation nor sentence rep-
etition tasks assess listeners ability to understand the meaning of a text (Buck, 2003).

Fill-in-the-gap tasks were primarily developed for teaching reading compre-

hension, however, they have been widely used in listening comprehension instruc-
tion. In fill-in-the-gap tasks, learners are given transcripts of aural texts containing
blanks, listen to a recording of the printed text, and are expected to fill in the blanks.2

Example 5:
Learners listen to the song and fill in the blanks:
Don’t know_______I’ve been so blue
Don’t know_______’s come over you
You have found someone new
And don’t it make my brown eyes blue (etc.)
(Buck, 2003, p.88)

Example 6:
Learners hear:
Conforama (a French radio-advertisement for furniture store chain in France)
- Deux, un… il est lancé le nouveau record Conforama !!!
- Un ensemble composé d’une grande bibliothèque, plus un bureau, plus une chaise
dactylo : 795 francs seulement ! Bibliothèque et bureau colories frêne vert ou pin !
- 795 francs, les trois pièces disponibles immédiatement ! Seule Confo peut vous l’offrir !

2 This example is taken from a real-life listening test designed by the author of this document.
 8 Ableeva

- Mais ce record, c’est jusqu’au 24 août !

- Venez chez Conforama : le pays ou la vie est moins chère !

Learners read:
Complétez les phrases suivantes (complete the following sentences) :
- Deux, un… il est lancé le _____________ _____________ Conforama.
- Un ensemble composé d’une _________ ______________, plus un _______________,
plus une _____________ dactylo : 795 francs seulement.
- Mais ce record, c’est jusqu’au ______ _________ seulement !

It should be noted that fill-in-the gap tasks have an obvious weakness when used to teach
listening comprehension (Henning, Gary& Gary, 1983; Weir, 1993; Buck, 2003). That is,
learners tend to listen only for missing parts and/or complete the blanks in the text with-
out fully understanding the text. The main criticism of fill-in-the-gap tasks and listening
recall tasks is that they only provide evidence of what learners processed (heard) but not
what they understood.

Statement evaluation tasks require learners to evaluate the truth of a statement (ex-
ample 5) or to compare two sentences and to determine whether they have the same
meaning (example 6). For example, learners hear:

Example 7:
Learners hear:
The Moon is the only Earth’s natural satellite.
Learners are invited to circle an answer:
1. True
2. False

Example 8:
Learners hear:
(a) New-Orleans was devastated by hurricane Katrina.
(b) When the hurricane came ashore, the city was devastated.

Despite the disadvantages of statement evaluation tasks (e.g. again listeners are exposed
to decontextualized sentences), the task procedures can guarantee to some extent that
learners have to process the sentences at the semantic level otherwise it would be impos-
sible for them to evaluate the statements they hear.

Translation tasks are not generally considered to be integrative tasks but are instead
quite similar to dictation tasks. Learners listen to a recorded text that has been divided into
short segments beforehand and then write down in their native language what they heard
in the target language. While Buck (1992) sees translation as a reliable source of whether
learners understand what they hear or not, he highlights two major drawbacks: the teacher
cannot be monolingual, and teachers and learners must share the same native language.

While the integrative approach developed some listening tasks with which lis-
tening could be processed in real time, these tasks allow listeners to attend only to the
semantic meaning of the text and do not encourage learners “to relate linguistic in-
 CALPER Professional Development Document No. 0810 9

formation to a wider context or to ask the test-taker to process inferential meanings”

(Buck, 2003, p. 82). At present, listening is no longer considered to be listening if used
for the sole purpose of improving pronunciation, studying grammar or vocabulary be-
cause “by definition, reading [listening] involves comprehension. When readers [listen-
ers] are not comprehending, they are not reading [listening]” (Chastain, 1988, p. 217).

The communicative approach

With the raise of the communicative approach, which sees language proficiency as the
development of communicative competence, language instruction should highlight the
importance of authentic communication by presenting and using the spoken and written
forms of the language in meaningful contexts. Weir (1990) outlines the characteristics of
the communicative approach as follows: the focus should be on communicative perfor-
mance and not on linguistic accuracy; tasks should account for conditions of actual per-
formance as closely as possible; the use of authentic language is important; the authentic-
ity of tasks and the genuineness of texts are necessary; it is important to identify skills and
performance conditions of language use in particular contexts; a variety of tasks should be
designed with respect to communicative purposes; tasks should reproduce communica-
tive teaching activities but exclude peer or teacher assistance during the task procedures.

The key features of the communicative approach to assessing listening com-

prehension are authenticity and purposefulness (e.g. purposeful listening). The au-
thenticity feature is manifest in the use of texts taken from authentic sources (e.g. ra-
dio stations, TV channels of the L2 speech community). The purposefulness feature
occurs when the task simulates/approximates real-world situations. For example,

Example 9:
You and some friends want to go out for dinner together. Listen to restaurant reviews and
make some notes about each restaurant. Then discuss with your friends which restaurant
you think you would all like to go to. Listen for information like price, location and quality
of food and service.
(Flowerdew & Miller, 2005, p. 13)

This example clearly demonstrates that communicative tasks require that teachers find
authentic text (or texts) yet, it also presents at least two major challenges. First, it as-
sumes that there are many ways to interpret a text, many more than can predicted. In
this regard, it may be difficult to determine which interpretation of a text is correct (Buck,
2003). Second, the existence of many communicative situations and/or contexts chal-
lenges the generalizability of communicative listening tasks. That is, the ability of listen-
ers to perform in one particular test situation does not guarantee that they will be able to
demonstrate the same ability in other situations (Buck, 2003; Flowerdew & Miller, 2005).

Despite the current predominance of the communicative approach in for-

eign language teaching/learning, at present there is considerable overlap between
the listening tasks developed by all three pedagogical frameworks, e.g. discrete-point
(e.g. paraphrase recognition) or integrative (e.g. fill-in-the-gap) tasks are still wide-
 10 Ableeva

ly used in language classrooms. Listening instruction and assessment today take a

variety of approaches that can be used interchangeably or in combination in order
to better develop and assess learners’ abilities to comprehending spoken discourse.

Conclusion

Currently, language pedagogy views listening comprehension as an interactive process

entailing the learners’ knowledge of the linguistic code (bottom-up) and the learners’
knowledge of the world (top-down) based on schema structures that aid comprehen-
sion. Recent research acknowledges that listening comprehension processes involve not
only bottom-up and top-down processes but also social or socio-cultural dimensions (e.g.
Flowerdew & Miller, 2005).

While the discrete point approach sees listening comprehension as the ability to
recognize individual features of the language, the integrative approach seeks to under-
stand listening as the ability to process language effectively. Today the communicative
approach regards listening comprehension as a process of making inferences. Each of
these approaches has contributed in its own way to framing the theoretical and practical
bases of listening instruction.

The listening tasks discussed above are prominent in today’s language classroom.
They can be used in a variety of ways depending on learners’ academic needs and goals
and on learners’ level of proficiency. For example, the listening task presented in Exam-
ple 5 might best be used with beginning level learners whereas the tasks from Examples
8 and 9 may be most appropriate for intermediate learners. In order to develop L2 lis-
tening ability, the use of various listening tasks should be geared to learners’ level of
proficiency, as well as to the particular instructional goals, including their listening goals.
For example, instructional goals related to listening comprehension are processing of
discrete-point information (see Example 1), processing of spoken discourse for functional
purposes (e.g. to listen and to interact with other learners in order to complete a real-life
listening task, see Example 9). Thus, listening tasks enable teachers to develop specific
(e.g. to discriminate between L2 sounds) or general (e.g. to listen for a specific informa-
tion) listening skills. It is important to highlight here that the use of listening tasks in lan-
guage instruction requires us, teachers, to make appropriate pedagogical choices in or-
der to foster learners’ listening abilities and, consequently, their language development.

For more information on the teaching of listening comprehension, the following

collection of scholarly publications is recommended:

Buck, G. (2003). Assessing Listening. 3rd printing. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Flowerdew, J. and Miller, L. (2005) Second Language Listening: Theory and Practice.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 CALPER Professional Development Document No. 0810 11

Hall, J.K. (2001). Methods for Teaching Foreign Languages. Columbus, Ohio: Merill
Prentice Hall.

Omaggio-Hadley, A. (2000). Teaching Langauge in Context. 3rd edition. Heinle.

Rost M. (2002). Teaching and Researching Listening. Longman: Pearson Education.

Shrum, J.L. (1994). Teacher’s handbook: contextualized language instruction. Boston: Heinle &
Heinle Publishers.

Ur, P. (1984). Teaching Listening Comprehension. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

An annotated listening comprehension bibliography can be found at:

http://www.abax.co.jp/listen/bibliography.html

References

Abry, D., Chalaron, M. (1994). Phonétique, 350 exercices. Paris : Hachette.

Auger, J., Valdman, A. (1999) Letting French students hear the diverse voices of Franco-
phony. Modern Language Journal 83: 403-412.

Bernhardt, E.B. (1991). Reading Development in a Second language. Norwood,

New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation.

Buck, G. (1992). Translation as a language testing procedure: does it work? Language Test-
ing, 9 (2), 123 -148.

Buck, G. (2003). Assessing Listening. 3rd printing. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Carell, P., Devine, J., Eskey, D. (1991). Interactive Aproaches to Second Language Reading.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chastain, K. (1988). Developing second-language skills: Theory and practice. (3rd ed.).San Di-
ego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Flowerdew, J. and Miller, L. (2005) Second Language Listening: Theory and Practice. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hall, J.K. (2001). Methods for Teaching Foreign Languages. Columbus, Ohio: Merill Prentice
Hall.

Henning, G., Gary, N., and Gary, J. (1983). Listening recall: a listening comprehension tests for
 12 Ableeva

low proficiency learners. System, 11, 287 – 293.

Kern, R. (2000). Literacy and Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kinginger, C. (1998) Videoconferencing as access to spoken French. The Modern Language

Journal 82: 502-513.

Oller, J.W., Jr. (1979). Language tests at school. London,: Longman.

O’Malley, J.M. and Chamot, A.U. (1990) Learning strategies in Second Language Acquisi-
tion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Omaggio-Hadley, A. (2000). Teaching Langauge in Context. 3d edition.Heinle.

Roebuck, R. (1998). Reading and Recall in L1 and L2: a Sociocultural Approach. Stamford:
Ablex Publishing Corporation.

Rost M. (2002). Teaching and Researching Listening. Longman: Pearson Education.

Rumelhart, D.E., and Ortony, A. (1977). The representation of knowledge in memory. In

R.C.Anderson, R.J. Spiro and W.E. Montague (eds.), Schooling and the acquisition
of knowledge. Hillsdale, Nej: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Scott, M. L., Stansfield, C.W., and Kenyon, D. (1996). Examining validity in a perfor-
mance test: The listening summary translation exam (LSTE) – Spanish version.
Language Testing, 13 (1), 83 -109.

Shrum, J.L. (1994). Teacher’s handbook: contextualized language instruction. Boston: Heinle
& Heinle Publishers.

Swaffar, J.K., Arens, K.M., Byrnes, H. (1991). Reading for meaning: an Integrated Approach
to Language Learning. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

Vandergrift, L. (1998). Successful and less successful listeners in French: What are the
strategy differences? The French Review, vol.71, n. 3: 370-395.

Ur, P. (1984). Teaching Listening Comprehension. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Weir, C. (1990). Communicative Language Testing. New York: Prentice Hall.

Weir, C. (1993). Understanding and developing language tests. New-York: Prentice Hall.
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