ABSTRACT
Teachers in the Japanese university classroom are lucky that their students come with significant experience listening to English, but then comes the shock when they discover that what they’ve been listening to is like nothing they are likely to hear in the real world. I remember the first time I played a short clip from a U.S. travel program for my students. At the end of the clip, the students were silent, sitting with stunned looks on their faces. This brief “authentic” clip seemed to be in an unknown language—certainly not one they had been studying for years. Fortunately, the shock passes, and during a well-designed course students gradually gain confidence in their listening skills, eventually being amazed at their ability to listen to (and understand) authentic texts.
