Gianfranco Conti and I are embraking on a second edition of our best-selling handbook called Breaking the Sound Barrier: Teaching Language Learners How to Listen (2019). We wrote the book to help address how we should go beyond just teaching listening through traditional comprehension exercises. In so doing, we were strongly influenced by the work of John Field whose 2008 book Listening in the Language Classroom questioned the so-called comprehension model (a product -based model, sometimes called teaching by testing), and proposed his process model , known by Gianfranco Conti as listening-as-modelling . Catching up with studies over the last six years is a reminder to me that research on how to teach listening is out there, but it has remained a relatively neglected area. What research there has been has tended to focus on metacognition - strategies for helping learners be better listeners. Field's process model, focused more on decoding skills, has not been followed up to a ...
(I have fixed some typos in the original draft) Introduction In England, Wales and Northern Ireland the current GCSE in modern foreign languages (MFL) is an improvement on the old O-Level in some important ways. In 1987 it moved beyond the elitist, grammar-translation-heavy approach that once dominated language teaching, placing greater emphasis on communication and offering an exam that was, in theory, accessible to a broader range of students. But despite that step change, the GCSE is still failing to meet the needs of many learners. It is no longer fit for purpose — and the model could do with a major rethink. Just don't expect it any time soon. A System That Bakes in Failure Now, first of all, the system works pretty well for higher-achieving students, the ones I often taught over the years. It allows the teacher enough freedom to work in communicative ways, certain in the knowledge that pupils will be well-prepared for the assessment and achieve high grades. In my own contexts...