James mannion, bespoke programmes leader, ucl institute of education, uk; director, rethinking education, uk; associate, oracy cambridge, uk neil mercer, emeritus professor, hughes hall, university of cambridge, uk; director, oracy

What does research tell us about listening?
Spoken language differs from written language in a number of important ways. Buck (2001) identified three characteristics of speech that are particularly important for listening comprehension: (a) speech is encoded in the form of sound; (b) it is linear and takes place in real time, with no chance of review; and (c) it is linguistically different from written language. From an educational standpoint, therefore, it is clear that the teaching of speaking and listening skills requires a very different approach than teaching of written forms of literacy and numeracy.
Listening skills are difficult to observe and difficult to define. Despite this, a significant body of research has been conducted, mainly in real classroom or tutorial settings. These studies typically focus on listening comprehension, listening strategies or a combination of the two (e.g. Chand, 2007; Zhang, 2012; Moradi, 2013). Throughout the last 20 years, research has consistently shown that teaching students strategies for improving their listening has a positive effect on their comprehension of what they hear (e.g. Vandergrift, 2004; Zhang, 2012).
People often think of listening skills as generic – something that can be applied across a range of contexts. To an extent, this is true. However, there is also evidence that the extent to which strategies for teaching listening are effective depends on the expertise of the student. For example, a recent study by Jiang et al. (2017) found that novices learn best from instruction that combines reading and listening, while more knowledgeable learners benefit from a reading-only approach.
A recent study found that critical-analytical listening skills are associated with improved learning in maths and computer science at the undergraduate level (Ferrari-Bridgers et al., 2017). Despite such positive findings, however, listening remains relatively overlooked in language teaching and in education more widely.
Mendelsohn (2001) and Berne (1998) reported that by the turn of the century, the findings of research on listening skills had not yet reached the classroom. Our review of the literature suggests that this situation has not changed dramatically in the interim. As a consequence, teachers typically do not instruct their students in ways of listening effectively. We will now outline some practical strategies that schools can use to redress this imbalance.