Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

 As Gianfranco and I demonstrated in our book Breaking the Sound Barrier;:Teaching language Learners How to Listen (Conti and Smith, 2019), listening is frequently a neglected skill, whilst being the most important one for language acquisition. Masses of comprehensible listening is at the heart of language learning. that's how we are 'wired' to acquire languages, both first and additional. So listening (from the teacher's voice, audio or video) is a major focus of my frenchteacher site, right through from beginner to advanced level. This can be one-way/unidirectional listening or two-way/interpersonal listening (listening as part of dialogue). One type of listening task we have advocated is narrow listening - a term first coined by Stephen Krashen, but adapted by Gianfranco in a particular way to enable multiple repetitions of common chunks with the aim of helping embed them in long-term memory for fluent recognition, recall and use later. Textbooks sometimes do so...