Early days

In the early days of English Language Teaching (ELT), listening chiefly served as a means of introducing new grammar through model dialogues. Commentators have sometimes implied that it was not until the late 1970s and the advent of communicative approaches that the skill was first taught in its own right. This version of events is not strictly true. In language schools in Britain, listening practice featured quite regularly in course programmes from the late sixties onwards, though the materials available were relatively few and on tape rather than cassette. One of the first listening courses (Abbs, Cook and Underwood) came out in 1968, and Mary Underwood's now-classic authentic interviews and oral narratives date from 1971 and 1976 (though, admittedly, they were ahead of their time in terms of recorded content). Still, it is sobering to reflect that it was only from 1970 that a listening component featured in the Cambridge First Certificate exam, and that until 1984 its listening texts consisted of passages of written prose which were read aloud.

The lesson format used by many teachers in those early days was a relatively rigid one which reflected the structuralist orthodoxy of the time (see Table 1.1).

Some features of this early lesson format are worth noting.