An overview of historical changes in teaching listening skills and its implication for future development

In this article, I reviewed different methods for teaching listening skills. The findings show that there are two types of teaching purpose : (a) listening exercises in order to introduce linguistic knowledge and (b) listening exercises in order to review and improve language skills that have already been introduced. The former type of listening exercises had not been widely practiced yet. In addition, although the contents of learning shifted from the structural syllabus to the scene, the subject, and the function syllabus, there is no syllabus available that can accommodate different levels of learners. In addition, there seems to be not enough opportunity for learners to receive a lot of high quality input in different contexts. Furthermore, we need to adjust methods for checking listening comprehension according to different purposes of listening. These findings should be taken into consideration when developing new listening materials in future