The importance of listening in language learning and listening comprehension problems experienced by language learners: a literature review

2. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HEARING AND LISTENING 
Kline (1996) states that being aware of the difference between hearing and listening is an 
important feature for learning and teaching listening effectively. He describes the 
difference as follows: “Hearing is the reception of sound, listening is the attachment of 
meaning to the sound. Hearing is passive, listening is active” (p. 7). Similarly, Rost 
(2002) states the difference as follows: “Hearing is a form of perception. Listening is an 
active and intentional process. Although both hearing and listening involve sound 
perception, the difference in terms reflects a degree of intention” (p. 8). According to 
Flowerdew and Miller (2005), all children are born with the ability to hear. Children first 
listen and then start to speak. They speak before they read, and finally writing comes after 
reading. That is, among all the other language skills, listening is the first one to appear 
(Lundsteen, 1979). 
Rost (2002) states that over the years listening has been defined in various ways by 
educators in social sciences depending on their area of expertise. In the 1900s, listening 
was defined “in terms of reliably recording acoustic signals in the brain” (p. 1). In the 
1920s and 1930s, with more information obtained about the human brain, listening was 
defined as an “unconscious process controlled by hidden cultural schemata” (p. 1). 
Because of the advances in telecommunications in the 1940s, listening was defined as 
“successful transmission and recreation of messages” (p. 1). In the 1960s, listening 
included listeners’ own experiences to understand the intention of the speaker. In the 
1970s “the cultural significance of speech behavior” was accepted. In the 1980s and 
1990s, listening was defined as “parallel processing of input” (p. 1). O’Malley, Chamot, 
and Kupper (1989) define listening comprehension as “an active and conscious process 
in which the listener constructs meaning by using cues from contextual information and 
from existing knowledge, while relying upon multiple strategic resources to fulfill the 
task requirements” (p. 434). Vandergrift (1999) defines listening as “a complex, active 
process in which the listener must discriminate between sounds, understand vocabulary 
and grammatical structures, interpret stress and intonation, retain what was gathered in 
all of the above, and interpret it within the immediate as well as the larger sociocultural 
context of the utterance” (p. 168). 
To summarize, when all the aforementioned definitions are taken into account, defining 
listening as a passive skill would be misleading (Anderson & Lynch, 2003; Lindslay & 
Knight, 2006). If the listener takes part actively in the process of listening linguistically 
and uses his/her non-linguistic knowledge to follow up the message that the speaker 
intends in a conversation, if s/he listens, replies, and asks/answers questions, it is active 
listening (Lindslay & Knight, 2006, Littlewood, 1981). As Anderson and Lynch (2003) 
state, understanding is not something that happens because of what speaker says, the 
listener needs to make connections between what s/he hears and what s/he already knows 
and at the same time he/she tries to comprehend the meaning negotiated by the speaker.

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Selin YILDIRIM, & Özgür YILDIRIM
2097