LISTENING 

Listening is the most common communicative activity in daily life: 

"we can expect to listen twice as much as we speak, four times more than we read, and five times more than we write." (Morley, 1991, p. 82)

Listening is also important for obtaining comprehensible input that is necessary for language development.

What is involved in listening comprehension?

speech perception (e.g., sound discrimination, recognize stress patterns, intonation, pauses, etc.) word recognition (e.g., recognize the sound pattern as a word, locate the word in the lexicon, retrieve lexical, grammatical and semantic inforamtion about the word, etc.) sentence processing (parsing; e.g., detect sentence constituents, building a structure frame, etc.) construct the literal meaning of the sentence (select the relevant meaning in case of ambiguous word) hold the inforamtion in short-term memory recognize cohesive devices in discourse infer the implied meaning and intention (speech act) predict what is to be said decide how to respond