Levinson, S. C. 1983. Pragmatics.
Cambridge: Teaching and Learning Second Language Listening:
Cambridge University Press.
Mey, J. L. 2001. Pragmatics: An Introduction
(second edition). Oxford: Blackwell.
Quirk, R. and H. G. Widdowson (eds.). 1985.
English in the World: Teaching and Learning the
Language and Literatures. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Roever, C. 2009. ‘Teaching and testing
pragmatics’ in M. H. Long and C. J. Doughty
(eds.). The Handbook of Language Teaching.
Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Ross, J. R. 1970. ‘On declarative sentences’ in
R. A. Jacobs and P. S. Rosenbaum (eds.). Readings
in English Transformational Grammar. Waltham,
MA: Ginn.
Sacks, H., E. A. Schegloff, and G. Jefferson. 1974.
‘A simplest systematics for the organization of
turn-taking for conversation’. Language 50/4:
696–735.
The reviewer
Peter Grundy specializes in pragmatics and is the
author of Doing Pragmatics, now in its third edi-
tion, and the joint editor with Dawn Archer of The
Pragmatics Reader. He is also the author of several
resource books for teachers including Beginners
and Newspapers and, with Arthur Brookes, Writing
for Study Purposes and Beginning to Write, as well
as English through Art with Hania Bociek and Kevin
Parker. He has taught in schools in the United
Kingdom and Germany and worked in higher edu-
cation in the United Kingdom and Hong Kong. He
is a past President of IATEFL and currently chairs
the IATEFL Wider Membership Scheme Committee.
Email: grundypeter@btinternet.com
doi:10.1093/elt/ccu005
Advance Access publication February 19, 2014
Reviews
Metacognition in Action
L. Vandergrift and C. C. M. Goh
Routledge 2012, 315 pp., £34.99
isbn 978 0 415 88372 6
The teaching of listening in language teaching
has unquestionably moved on over the past 50
years. Yet despite this, listening continues to be
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the cause of much anxiety for many students. Is
this because it is the area of language learning
that they feel least in control of, or is it because
as teachers we still tend to test listening rather
than teach it? Whatever the answer, listening is a
critical part of learning a new language, and one
that until recently has not received the attention
it warrants. This makes Teaching and Learning
Second Language Listening: Metacognition in Action
a welcome addition to current titles such as those
by Field (2008), Wilson (2008), and, most recently
of all, Cauldwell (2013).
The book is divided into three parts. Part I,
‘Learning to listen’, consists of four chapters.
Chapter 1 offers an overview of listening instruction
over the last 50 years, from the text-oriented
instruction of the 1950s and 1960s, through the
communication-oriented instruction that evolved
alongside communicative language teaching in the
1980s and 1990s, to more recent learner-oriented
instruction. The chapter concludes with a call for a
holistic approach to L2 listening, and the proposal
of a metacognitive framework as the solution to the
weaknesses in previous approaches.
Chapter 2 describes the listening process itself:
the cognitive processes in operation as we listen
in L2, the knowledge sources listeners draw
upon, the affective demands made on a listener,
and so on. A model of the cognitive processes is
presented in detail in the first part of the chapter,
whilst the second part provides a valuable review
of the special demands of interactive as opposed
to one-way listening.
Chapter 3 builds on the previous chapter and
puts forward a cognitive model of listening
comprehension based on the work of Levelt
(1993). If anybody in ELT still sees listening as a
passive skill, this chapter will force them to rethink
their position. Indeed, at the end of the chapter
the reader is left wondering how learners manage
to understand anything in L2. If nothing else, this
chapter will change teachers’ empathy for their
learners’ efforts during listening activities.
211
Essential reading for any language teacher,
Chapter 4 examines the factors that influence
listening success. Extensive research into a wide
range of cognitive, affective, and contextual factors
is carefully summarized. It should come as no
surprise that vocabulary knowledge influences
success more than syntactic knowledge, but it is
unsettling to see that vocabulary can account for
up to 50 per cent of that success.
The six chapters of Part II explore the role of
metacognition in listening. Chapter 5 gives us
the theoretical background to a metacognitive
approach, beginning with a review of what we
understand by the term ‘metacognition’, and
ending with a look at metacognitive instruction.
This lays the ground for the remaining chapters
in Part II, which look, in turn, at different practical
aspects of this approach.
Chapters 6 and 7 deal with the nuts and bolts of
putting a metacognitive approach into action,
with Chapter 6 providing a pedagogical sequence
that sets out how teachers can incorporate the
processes of planning, monitoring, problem-
solving, and evaluation into their current listening
work. Chapter 7 presents two groups of activities for
metacognitive instruction: integrated experiential
listening tasks and guided reflection activities.
The activities are designed for use during the
pedagogical sequence outlined in the previous
chapter, and to help learners to better regulate the
metacognitive processes they need to apply for
successful listening.
Chapter 8, ‘Developing perception and word
segmentation skills’, will be familiar territory to
pronunciation experts working at the interface
between listening and pronunciation or familiar
with the work of Field (op.cit.) and Cauldwell
(op.cit.). The chapter looks at the bottom-up
component of listening and presents classroom
activities to help learners develop the phonological
skills needed to decode the speech stream.
Chapter 9, ‘Task-based listening lessons’, offers a
process-oriented approach to L2 listening, which
the authors flag up as being complimentary to the
pedagogical sequence described in Chapter 6.
As with some earlier chapters, there is a wealth
of valuable information here above and beyond
the strict confines of a metacognitive approach
to listening. In that respect, the chapter will be of
real interest to teachers and materials writers who
follow a task-based learning approach.
212 Reviews
Complementary to much of what has gone before
in Part II, Chapter 10 looks at how learners can
continue to improve their listening through
four extensive listening activities. Facilitated
independent listening and ‘Listening buddies’ are
specifically designed to encourage self-directed
listening outside the classroom, and although not
all learners take to this with the same enthusiasm,
in my own experience, self-directed work is central
to significant improvement for learners that find
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listening problematic.
Part III of the book, ‘Listening in other contexts’,
consists of two chapters, the first of which
examines listening in multimedia environments.
Following the structure of previous chapters,
the authors report on research in this area and
then set out a number of tentative guidelines
for the use of multimedia to improve listening.
There are good recommendations here and also
useful warnings about what not to expect from
multimedia.
Chapter 12, ‘Assessing listening for learning’,
discusses formative and summative assessment.
A variety of tools are described for each type
of assessment, including checklists, diaries,
interviews, and portfolios for formative assessment,
and quizzes, achievement, and proficiency tests for
summative assessment. The issues of test validity,
reliability, and authenticity are also dealt with.
Teaching and Learning Second Language Listening:
Metacognition in Action ends with three useful
Appendices, especially A and B, which offer a
comprehensive list of strategies for L2 listening,
and a reproducible copy of Vandergrift and
Goh’s Metacognitive Awareness of Listening
Questionnaire. There is also an Epilogue, which
gives the authors’ views on the thought-provoking
ten-point questionnaire in the Prologue. Readers
are invited to do the questionnaire and then read
the book, but I confess that I went straight to the
Epilogue to see what the authors had to say.
I suspect I may not be alone in ‘cheating’ like this,
but reading the Epilogue motivated me to read the
book and hopefully discover more about learning
to listen.
So did I discover more? Without a doubt. In fact,
it would be impossible to read this book and
not discover things. It is very thorough, and it is
based on the authors’ deep knowledge of the field.
No stone is left unturned, and in that respect,
Teaching and Learning Second Language Listening:
Metacognition in Action is destined to become a
key ‘reference book for professionals in the field of
second language acquisition’ (p. xiv), both as an
introduction to the field for those about to embark
on their own research and for ELT coursebook
and materials writers who want to go beyond
the communication-oriented listening approach
that characterizes most current coursebooks. In
addition, all of us in ELT would do well to read
Chapters 1, 3, and 4.
Oddly, however, the thoroughness the authors
display in their endeavour to cover every angle,
together with the scenarios and pre-reading
reflection activity at the beginning of every chapter,
come together to create, for me, a somewhat
overwhelming whole. After browsing the Epilogue,
what I was looking for, as a teacher educator
and practising teacher, was transparent practical
guidance on how best to help learners improve
their listening. This is undoubtedly there, but as a
reader you need to persevere in order to extract it.
Overall, I’m not sure that Teaching and Learning
Second Language Listening: Metacognition in Action
will achieve its stated aim of helping teachers
to ‘understand the process of listening, the role
of metacognition in listening development, and
how to teach listening more effectively’ (p. xiii),
and I do feel that the metacognitive approach
it proposes, whilst of very real value for helping
adults involved in one-way listening such as in
academic lectures, is perhaps less applicable to
interactive listening or to listening activities with
younger learners.
References
Cauldwell, R. 2013. Phonology for Listening.
Birmingham: Speech in Action.
Field, J. 2008. Listening in the Language Classroom.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levelt, W. 1993. ‘Language use in normal speakers
and its disorders’ in G. Blanken, J. Dittmann,
H. Grimm, J. C. Marshall, and C.-W. Wallesch
(eds.). Linguistic Disorders and Pathologies. Berlin:
de Gruyter.
Wilson, J. J. 2008. How to Teach Listening. Harlow:
Pearson Education Limited.
The reviewer
Robin Walker is a freelance teacher, teacher edu-
cator, and materials writer. He has been in ELT
for over 30 years, and from a base in Spain works
around the world delivering talks, seminars, and
courses, especially on pronunciation and related
themes. He has written numerous articles on
teaching English and is co-author of Tourism, a
three-level course in Oxford University Press’s
Reviews
Oxford English for Careers series, and author of
Teaching the Pronunciation of English as a Lingua
Franca. Robin is the editor of Speak Out!, the
newsletter of the IATEFL Pronunciation SIG.
Email: robin@englishglobalcom.com
doi:10.1093/elt/ccu003
Advance Access publication February 18, 2014
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How We Learn and How We Should be Taught:
An Introduction to the Work of Caleb Gattegno
(Volume 1)
R. Young and P. Messum
Duo Flumina 2011, 202 pp., £14.99
isbn 0 9568755 0 5
Young and Messum’s title is a welcome addition
to the literature, the first of two volumes aiming to
re-present the work of Caleb Gattegno (1911–1988)
to a new generation of teachers. During the 1970s
and 1980s, many language teachers encountered
the Silent Way or heard about it at some remove.
They may associate it with coloured rods and
word charts, but the Silent Way is neither of those
things and is better seen as the language learning
application of Gattegno’s much larger vision
for education, the Subordination of Teaching to
Learning. Gattegno was a scientist, mathematician,
psychologist, investigator of human learning,
and polyglot (English, which he spoke and wrote
both fluently and elegantly was his fifth or sixth
language.) Some readers of this review will recall
a number of Gattegno’s publications, in particular
The Common Sense of Teaching Foreign Languages
([1976] 2010), The Universe of Babies ([1973] 2010),
and What we Owe Children ([1971] 2010). More
widely read, perhaps, were Earl Stevick’s accounts
of the Silent Way, especially in Memory Meaning
Method (1976) and Teaching Languages: A Way and
Ways (1980). The authors of the title under review
would probably describe themselves as committed
students of Gattegno’s work. Roslyn Young met
Gattegno in 1971 when she saw him teaching
Chinese the Silent Way, and Piers Messum met
him in Japan in the 1980s while learning Japanese
through the Silent Way.
For many teachers in the United Kingdom and
elsewhere, the 1970s was a colourful time of
professional excitement. The places my colleagues
and I worked at thrived on the discussion and
testing of rival educational theories and practices.
In addition to experience of the successful
‘eclectic’ training originated by International
213