Listening skill teaching: Some pedagogical considerations

The purpose of this teaching article is to explore those factors that seem to have a pedagogical effect on successful L2 listening comprehension. To do this, a small-scale listening comprehension project was carried out in 2006 with a group of forty student teachers--whose first language was Spanish--attending an English Language course at a Teacher Training Program, Corrientes, Argentina. In this project, data were drawn from students’ interviews and questionnaires before and after instruction which were, later on, critically analysed and interpreted. The results emerging from this project showed the importance and usefulness that should be given to the convergence of listening skill teaching with affective and environmental factors, pronunciation, and listening materials if L2 learners are meant to overcome recurrent difficulties in comprehending oral discourse. In the light of these findings, some future directions for research in this area were suggested.