The Art of Listening in an Educational Perspective

Abstract

The purpose is to contribute to the theory and practice of listening reception as one of the four language arts in Swedish as a school subject. The object of inquiry is The Art of Listening (Adelmann 2009) as a Swedish example from a Scandinavian context, compared to mainstream listening research in the USA. The problem explored is: How can we, as researchers and teachers, handle some of the problems within international listening research and adapt listening research to a Scandinavian context. Results of the study show that The Art of Listening is mainly influenced by listening research in the USA, but also offer an alternative theoretical framework for listening by the Russian scholar Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895–1975). The main conclusion is that with an educational approach and an alternative theoretical framework it is possible to work with an expanding and including perspective in listening research and listening education.