As Gianfranco Conti and I are working behind the scenes on the new edition of our listening book Breaking the Sound Barrier: Teaching Language Learners How to Listen, we have been carefully reviewing and rewriting the text and checking for research carried out since we published the book in 2019. To put this in context, let me remind you that a central premise of the book is that the skill of listening can be broken down into micro-skills which can be targeted by specific classroom activities to help learners become more confident listeners. Listening lessons should not just be about ‘doing more listening’ or doing comprehension exercises, but be focused, especially with novices, on the particular sub-skills you need to be a successful listener. For example, being able to identify specific sounds, syllables, clusters of sounds; being able to segment the sound stream; being able to identify words and multi-word units in the sound stream; being able to grammatically parse sentences to ...
Before you read this, here is a reminder of my site with links to research papers and videos about second language learning and teaching: informedlanguageteacher.com I originally published a post in 2018 which summarised Chapter 16 of the Routledge Handbook of Instructed Second Language Acquisition (2017), edited by Loewen and Sato. With the aid of ChatGPT I have kept the content and structure of the original post and added a few observations from research published since then. These are marked in bold. Background The authors of the 2017 chapter begin by outlining the clear importance of vocabulary knowledge in language acquisition, stating that it's a key predictor of overall language proficiency (e.g. Alderson, 2007). Students often say that their lack of vocabulary is the main reason for their difficulty understanding and using the language (e.g. Nation, 2012). Historically vocabulary has been neglected when compared to grammar, notably in the grammar-translation and audio-lin...