Abstract

This chapter presents an overview of research to date of relevance to L2 lecture comprehension. After a general introduction to the topic, the first main section of the paper considers the lecture comprehension process. Theoretical conceptions of the process are dealt with under three headings: comprehension in general, distinctive features of listening comprehension, and distinctive features of lecture comprehension. The literature on lecture comprehension micro-skills and note-taking is also considered in this first main section. The second main section of the paper deals with the literature on lecture discourse. This work is divided up into a number of areas: lecturing styles, discourse structure, metapragmatic signalling, interpersonal features and lexico-grammatical features. The third and final main section of the paper discusses work on lecture input variables. Under this heading are grouped input studies, speech rate research and work on accent.

Introduction

As pointed out in the introduction to this volume, the spread of English as a world language has been accompanied by ever-growing numbers of people studying at university level through the medium of English as a second language, whether in their own country or in English-speaking countries as overseas students. A major part of university study remains the lecture (e.g., Johns 1981; Richards 1983; Benson 1989). Academic listening skills are thus an essential component of communicative competence in a university setting. And yet, although, as Richards (1983) has pointed out, “academic listening” (in contrast to “conversational listening”) has its own distinctive features, there has been relatively little research in this specific area.