Research into listening over the past three decades has, above all, highlighted the fundamental intricacy of the processes involved. In order to make sense of spoken messages, listeners may need to integrate information from a range of sources: phonetic, phonological, prosodic, lexical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. The fact that we achieve all this in real time as the message unfolds makes listening “complex, dynamic, and fragile” (Celce-Murcia 1995:366). In this review I consider research into four aspects of these complexities: processes (e.g., speech recognition, discourse comprehension, and memory); the role of context; factors influencing listening; and the relationship of listening with other language skills. Finally I suggest likely directions for future research into listening.

Second language (SL) speaking has not been recognized as a research area as readily as have reading, writing, or listening. For instance, the 25th anniversary volume of TESOL Quarterly had papers on reading, writing, and listening, but apart from a paper on pronunciation, not a single one on speaking. This may be due to assumptions such as the following: 1) SLA studies in any case focus on oral language production (e.g., the morpheme acquisition studies in the 1970's, the input-interaction studies of the 1980's for which oral interaction was only a way of acquiring new target language items, and the task-based learning studies of the 1990's);

Reading text is a relatively recent human activity, only having been around for about 5,000 years. Through text, writers are able to communicate with others at great distances. Readers are able to perceive arbitrarily determined shapes presented against some background and then form them into meaning. As the reader becomes more proficient at reading and uses reading in more and different ways, this process of interpreting letters and words becomes increasingly automatic.

The word “writing” refers not only to text in written script but also to the acts of thinking, composing, and encoding language into such text; these acts also necessarily entail discourse interactions within a socio-cultural context. Writing is text, is composing, and is social construction. This threefold distinction—between text analytic, composing process, and social constructivist views of writing—has served usefully to distinguish the major orientations adopted in inquiry into second language writing and to circumscribe the implications they have for instruction (e.g., Grabe and Kaplan 1996, Raimes 1991, Silva 1990).

The importance of listening is increasing in the world, and technological advances in global communication have made listening by non-native speakers even more crucial. The potential for misunderstanding has therefore also increased, making the teaching of listening comprehension (henceforth “listening”) even more important (Grant 1996).

Much recent work on optimal conditions for the teaching of speaking in second and foreign language classrooms has been grounded in educational psycholinguistics or in cognitive and social psychology. Theoretical constructs for language pedagogy have been drawn extensively from empirical studies, underpinned by the central notions of second language acquisition: communicative competence (Canale and Swain 1980); comprehensible input (Krashen 1985), negotiated interaction (Ellis 1990, Gass and Varonis 1994, Long 1983, Pica, et al. 1989), input processing (VanPatten and Cadierno 1993), developmental sequences and routes of acquisition (Meisel, Clahsen and Pienemann 1981), and communication strategies (Faerch and Kasper 1983). Such constructs are widely taught in teacher preparation programs in second and foreign language teaching and clearly have relevance to oral language instructional practice.

Look through the window of any second or foreign language (L2) reading classroom and, invariably, you will see the teacher and students seated with books open in front of them. This superficial similarity masks vast differences in teaching methodology, however. As the 20th century draws to a close, there are, around the world, at least four distinctive approaches to the teaching of L2 reading: grammar-translation, comprehension questions, skills and strategies, and extensive reading. After brief descriptions of these four approaches to teaching reading and their status in the reading classroom, important issues in L2 reading instruction are addressed, leading to more general concerns involving the relationship among theory, research, and teaching practice.

With just the two words of the title “Teaching writing,” we are thrown into ambiguity characteristic of the enterprise the title names. Is that second word a participle, referring to the activity of generating, composing, and revising ideas on paper, or is it a more static gerund noun form—writing as an artifact, as text presented on a page, performing social functions? The position we take with regard to the multiple realities encompassed in this dichotomy and in others in our field gives shape to our teaching. And that shape is changing.

Over the last two decades, research has highlighted the important role that listening plays in language acquisition (Brown and Yule 1983, Ellis, et al. 1994, Faerch and Kasper 1986, Feyten 1991, Long 1985), and listening comprehension skills have begun to receive a lot more systematic attention in language teaching classrooms. A wide range of books, articles, and materials aimed at assisting teachers to develop learners’ listening skills are now available, and a variety of comprehension-based methodologies have been proposed (see, for example, Anderson and Lynch 1988, Courchene, et al. 1992, Rost 1990; 1994, Underwood 1989). However, although many of the tasks used for teaching listening are virtually identical to those which appear in tests, assessment of listening ability has received relatively limited coverage in the language testing literature.

The publication of the ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) Guidelines (1986) and the creation and popularization of the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (ACTFL-OPI) have had a profound effect on foreign and second language instruction and assessment, drawing attention to language students' abilities to use language in performing particular functions and tasks rather than to what they have learned about language. The growing interest in communicative language teaching, with its emphasis on meaningful interaction in the language as opposed to knowledge of linguistic rules, has complemented interest in the ACTFL Guidelines' descriptions of functional language ability and the interview-format oral proficiency interview.

The fields of reading comprehension per se and second language reading comprehension are vast indeed, and an attempt to survey them will, of necessity, be attenuated in a chapter of this size. As a consequence, I will limit my discussion to six areas: 1) general comments concerning areas of interest in reading research and assessment, 2) the adaptation of a suitable first-language reading comprehension model for second-language assessment, 3) the reliance on a top-down model of reading comprehension, 4) the validity of multiple-choice reading comprehension tests, 5) research on behavioral anchoring, and 6) the testing of reading comprehension in a CAT (Computer Adaptive Testing) context.

Like so many other aspects of language analysis, assessing the writing abilities of non-native English speakers (NNES) becomes an increasingly complex issue as one explores both its root meaning and its current uses; this complexity can be traced, in part, to the recognition that writing abilities develop in interaction with other language skills. In this volume, various chapters have narrowed, if artificially, the area of investigation by providing for a separate consideration of assessment as applied to each of the four language skills; clearly assessment of language proficiency as a total package also is of great concern in academic contexts, especially where NNES students are concerned (see also Resources in Language Testing website).

In the last two decades, content-based instruction (CBI) has grown by leaps and bounds; it appears across educational levels and under various guises. In foreign language education, immersion education and “content-enriched” Foreign Language in the Elementary School (FLES) are popular examples. Sheltered classes and thematic curricula are two variations commonly found in ESL settings. The degree of language and content integration which underlies these various program types is perhaps best captured by means of a continuum.

In the last twenty years or so, language teaching has changed to incorporate a higher proportion of meaning-based activities, in contrast to the era in which form was primary and a concern for meaning only followed the establishment of control over specific forms. Now, a wide range of classroom options are available for participant organization, content incorporation, and the units by which teaching is organized. In order to locate task-based work within such a range of options, it is necessary to address definitional issues at the outset, since many different contemporary options give task a central role. For the purposes of this chapter, a task is regarded as an activity which satisfies the following criteria:

The past decade in language curriculum in Australia has been a time of exploration and innovation, and also a time of consolidation. During this period, curriculum planning reflected, first, a swing within the teaching profession to greater teacher responsibility in curriculum (a responsive curriculum), then a swing back to teacher accountability (an explicit curriculum) due to demands external to the teaching profession. In addition, language curriculum in Australia was strongly influenced by communicative language teaching theory (CLT) and the related developments of task-based learning (TBL), needs-based programming, and language as discourse theory.

There has been great recent interest in the social and policy context of language testing and assessment, to the point where it represents perhaps the most significant area of new thought and debate in the field of language testing. The topic has also produced a ferment of activity, reflected in policy statements, special symposia, and special issues of professional journals devoted to aspects of the subject. These discussions have been accompanied by the beginnings of a movement away from the traditional positivist, asocial paradigm for language testing research as traced in Lynch and Hamp-Lyons (1996; Hamp-Lyons and Lynch in press).

The contributions in this volume provide a comprehensive survey of recent research and pedagogic practice in what is described as ‘the four basic language skills.’ My brief, and my original intention, seemed straightforward enough: to provide a short overview which would comment on general trends in a relatively impartial manner. Impartiality is never easy to achieve, however, and since trends are typically a matter of implicit assumptions, discerning them is bound to be subjective in some degree. What I have done is to consider certain of these assumptions and relate them to general issues about the so-called language skills which have been subject to debate for some time. This commentary, then, is less a measured survey than a critical reflection, from an historical and personal perspective, on matters arising from these contributions.