ABSTRACT
There has been a revolution in the teaching of English in the last twenty years. In the early seventies it was still the case that spoken language was the poor relation of written language. Today the im portance of teaching the spoken language is universally acknowledged. Much of the energy and imaginativeness of many publishing enterprises is now poured into spoken language materials and it is taken for granted that anyone learning a foreign language needs to be able to use it for talking even though their primary need for it may still be to read or write it. This revolution has ensured that the problems of understanding the spoken form of the foreign language have received increasing attention both in research and in teaching. We now have a much better understanding of the processes of comprehension and there are now many courses on offer which claim to teach listening comprehension, and there are many books and conferences which claim to teach teachers how to improve their students’ performance in listening comprehension.
