A Brief History of Listening Comprehension in Second Language Teaching and Learning

Listening, as an overlooked aspect of a foreign language acquisition, was regarded as a passive procedure to be acquired by itself, during the early days of second language teaching. As the days of second language teaching were going by, the listening difficulties and problems ensued to get in the way of second language acquisition/learning. The automatic acquisition of listening comprehension seemed to be a failed assumption. The theorists and researchers in the field, consequently, came up with the idea of developing rigorous theories to initially redefine the listening process and furthermore set clear-cut and definite standards to help the learners improve their comprehension in a specific listening context. Looking at the listening comprehension with a new viewpoint, at a specific time in the history of second language acquisition, was not at a distance from the common views over learning and teaching at that time. Therefore, the prevailing views in a specific era exerted a powerful influence over the views on teaching listening comprehension skills. The theoretical definitions of listening comprehension along with a brief history of L2 listening comprehension from the very early days of second language teaching to the present time have been discussed in the subsequent sections.