International Research Journal of Education and Technology

Listening has a crucial role both in lifestyle and in academic contexts because it is crucial for people to sustain effective communication. In spite of the importance of listening within the development of the communicative and cognitive skills, it didn't start to require its place in teaching curriculum for long years. However, in past years, with the stress given in communication in language teaching, listening began to take its long deserved place in language programs. Although there are different perspectives in teaching listening, the success of every perspective somewhat depends on addressing and minimizing the listening comprehension problems experienced by language learners. This literature review aims at reviewing the essential concepts associated with the place and importance of listening skill in learning English as second or foreign language, and, within the light of the related literature, it  prominently focuses on listening comprehension problems experienced by second and foreign language learners. Listening in the second language (L2) is a complex process that is crucial to develop proficiency in the second language. Listeners use both bottom-up processors (linguistic knowledge) and top-down processes (prior knowledge) to understand. Knowing the context of an audio text and the purpose of listening significantly reduces the burden of comprehension. Teachers can help students develop strong strategies for understanding by developing a process approach to teach L2 listening. This will help students learn to listen and develop the knowledge and metacognitive strategies that are critical to successful listening.

Keywords–. Listening, crucial, Language, acquisition etc