Morality, Relationality, and Listening Pedagogy in Language Education

Abstract

Listening pedagogy in language education treats listening proficiency almost exclusively as a function or skill, the purpose of which is to generate products or outcomes desired by language users. Though listening is rhetorically acknowledged to be an active and complex process of making meanings within contexts and relationships, in practice teacher education and pedagogical discourse treat listening simply as a linguistic transaction and listening pedagogy as a technical and instrumental process of skill building, with the goal of enabling learners fluently to perform such transactions. Such a means-to-ends orientation, however, is inadequate or insufficient to encompass holistic moral and relational dimensions inherent in listening. These dimensions might be added to language listening pedagogy by, for example, broadening the idea of “dialogue” to include more open-ended perspectives from other disciplines, contextualizing the relationality of typical coursebook listening passages, and working with metaphors such as hospitality that encourage a high attentiveness to communication accompanied by a high moral respect for persons.