Kent Adelmann

Eavesdropping as Listening Development

In ordinary life we are constantly imbued by listening, and we seem to interact in different contextual dimensions of culture and society (Adelmann, 2002; Linell, 1998), both verbally and nonverbally. “Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue,” according to the Russian scholar Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1984, p. 293). In everyday life we get used to many kinds of situations where we hear conversations that we are actually not supposed to hear. For example, while we are waiting for the bus or subway we may listen to people next to us who appear to being having an argument. Usually we do not notice all these routine situations. But sometimes we do notice some interaction and listen with some attention. We have more of an absentminded attention and rarely listen attentively, but what if we did? The activity in listening presented here takes advantage of our daily and personal listening experiences of eavesdropping and use it for the educational purpose of listening development.

The Art of Listening in an Educational Perspective Listening reception in the mother tongue

The purpose is to contribute to the theory and practice of listening reception as one of the four language arts in Swedish as a school subject. The object of inquiry is The Art of Listening (Adelmann 2009) as a Swedish example from a Scandinavian context, compared to mainstream listening research in the USA. The problem explored is: How can we, as researchers and teachers, handle some of the problems within international listening research and adapt listening research to a Scandinavian context. Results of the study show that The Art of Listening is mainly influenced by listening research in the USA, but also offer an alternative theoretical framework for listening by the Russian scholar Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895–1975). The main conclusion is that with an educational approach and an alternative theoretical framework it is possible to work with an expanding and including perspective in listening research and listening education.