Authentic Listening Resource Pack: Bridging the Gap to Real-World Listening

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Despite the fact that thanks to the internet it has never been easier to get materials for listening practice, getting better at listening continues to be a tough task for most learners. The problem is, perhaps, that an abundance of materials does not automatically translate into an improvement in listening. In fact, if it were just a question of quantity, there would actually be no need for resource books like the Authentic Listening Resource Pack . The key, then, lies in quality rather than quantity, and in particular in the quality of learner training rather than of the recordings themselves. That is to say, it is not so much how much listening a learner manages to do, as what happens before, during, and even after the listening events themselves. The warning flags in this respect were clearly put up back in the 1980s ( Sheerin 1987 ), with early answers to the issue of effective listening being offered by John Field in his proposal for a new methodology ( Field 1998 ). Ten years later, Field (2008) provided us with a fully elaborated response to the teaching-versus-testing dilemma in his now highly regarded, and hopefully widely read, handbook on listening. More recently, Vandergrift and Goh (2012) have shone a valuable light on the role of metacognitive awareness for improved listening, and Cauldwell (2013) has taken us elegantly into the relationship between pronunciation and listening.