Listening Beyond Decoding: How to Develop a Listening Sequence for Audio-visual Literacy

ABSTRACT Within the communicative-oriented approaches to foreign language (FL) education, listening, often paired with speaking, plays an active role in language acquisition. However, textbook-based listening activities in Korean as a foreign language (KFL) are often mechanical, unrealistic, and ineffective and seldom motivate students nor enhance their overall listening proficiency without proper intervention. Given that listening ability is essential in FL acquisition in a natural, unstructured environment, it is high time to take stock of the past decade’s development of teaching listening and to share evidence-based learning strategies. Learners develop the most effective listening strategies with meaning-making activities designed with student-initiated materials of personal and academic interests and presented in the framework of differentiated learning without the fear of evaluation (Vandergrift, 2007). We showcase our sequential model of functional listening tasks designed for intermediate courses in a college program in the United States, based on authentic speech, with an aim to enhance audio-visual literacy within the proficiency-based framework (ACTFL, 2024).