Listening to lectures

Lectures remain a key, high-stakes pedagogical genre in higher education. However, effective lecture comprehension, notetaking and ultimately retention is a complex process both for L1 users of English and those who use English as an additional language. First, lectures are typically multimodal events in which auditory and visual input needs to be processed simultaneously and often in real-time. Second, the efficacy with which students process and record this input depends on a myriad of student and lecturer-related factors, including language proficiency, lecturing style, and lecture discourse features that accommodate and engage the listeners. Third, academic mobility and the associated rise of English as medium of instruction has resulted in diverse contexts in which lecturers and students are unfamiliar with each other’s language, cultural and educational backgrounds. Fourth, online lectures bring with them specific listening affordances and challenges. Lecture listening training and training can help students benefit from lectures, while research into lecture listening and lecture discourse helps us better understand students’ needs as well as how lecturers can accommodate these. This chapter surveys research that has contributed to our understanding of lecture comprehension as well as the effective design of lecture listening materials and training.