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Task-based methodology is particularly suited to teaching languages for specific purposes, because of its affinity to behavioural objectives. Doubts have been expressed as to whether learners actually learn language through doing tasks, and if they do, exactly what they learn. This paper reports the preliminary results of an ongoing study of the benefits of building repetition into a communicative task in an English for Specific Purposes course. We compare the performances of two learners at markedly different levels of English proficiency and find that both benefited from the opportunity to recycle communicative content as they repeated complex tasks. This suggests that task repetition of the type reported here may be a useful pedagogic procedure and that the same task can help different learners develop different areas of their interlanguage.

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.

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