This book presents a state-of-the-art collection of original research papers in the field of academic listening in a second language. The papers represent a variety of approaches to the empirical study of academic listening and present a wide range of research findings, together with implications and suggestions for pedagogy.

English is now well-established as the language of international academic exchange. It is being increasingly employed as the second language medium of instruction at tertiary level. As such, it is being used in three main contexts. First, it is being used as a second language by students studying overseas in English-speaking countries such as the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Australia. Second, it is being used by students studying in their own countries where for historical reasons English is the second language, for example, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, many of the Arab states and the Philippines. Third, and perhaps more unexpectedly, English is also being used as the language of instruction in countries like Japan, Germany and the newly independent Eastern European states, countries where there is no prima facie internal need for the language, but where English is being adopted as part of the internationalization of academic studies.

Within the field of academic study, from among the many instructional media at the disposal of teachers – reading assignments, writing assignments, seminars, tutorials, project work, field work, video, various types of self-access learning, etc. – the lecture remains the central instructional activity, achieving what Waggoner (1984, cited in Benson, this volume) refers to as “paradigmatic stature”, or what Benson (this volume) calls “the central ritual of the culture of learning”.