Technology and Second-Language Listening

Introduction: A Brief Historical Overview

For millennia, humans have used all of their senses to understand their environment and to communicate through touch, sight, smell, taste, and hearing. The increasing use of technology, particularly from the Industrial Age to the present, has focused ever greater attention to the concept of “listening.” Stethoscopes, for example, were invented through a realization that the body could express symptoms through sound, and it took nearly a century of socialization for audiences to learn to “listen” in silence during musical performances (Hendy 2013). Technology, then, forged a “new type of listening” that accelerated with the invention of audio recording and the telephone in the late nineteenth century. Listening became a distinct skill that needed its own pedagogy and materials, and educators soon began to stress the need for attentive listening to master difficult concepts. By the turn of the twentieth century, audio recordings were introduced...