Textbooks don't teach how to listen. 
Hear Here! can help.

ESL teachers preempt barriers to listening comprehension in the classroom by speaking more slowly, using basic vocabulary, and clearly enunciating every part of a word, among other strategies for successfully communicating with an ESL audience. For teachers, these practices are essential to classroom communication! Simplifying a teacher's spoken language fosters student-teacher understanding, builds student confidence, and sets up a foundation for more complex spoken language down the road.

Textbooks, on the other hand, have a different job, but tend to do the same. The purpose of bringing a listening comprehension lesson into the classroom should be to help students build their skills for understanding spoken English, not just to be understood from the get-go. And yet, listening sections in adult ESL textbooks rely on modified, scripted audio files that only engage students by asking a series of comprehension questions. This model of listening exercise does little to help students progress, and it is a contributing factor to making listening comprehension one of the most difficult skills to master in the English language classroom.  

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Although the purpose of textbooks is to cut down on lesson-planning, the textbook model forces teachers to address their shortcomings by making lessons with authentic audio clips from the internet.

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Hear Here! English takes the hassle out of making meaningful listening lessons for your adult ESL class. We use authentic, leveled audio that goes beyond comprehension questions to teach students how to identify and understand eight key characteristics of real-world spoken English. 

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Model

Hear Here! English follows a model for teaching listening outlined in Emerick, Wagner, and Wang (2018), which offers an alternative to textbooks' reliance on modified speech and comprehension questions. Emerick, Wagner, and Wang build on Field (2003) in their approach to listening comprehension by first utilizing top-down processing to support overall comprehension, and then moving on to develop bottom-up skills to support progression. In a series of three articles modeling their technique, Emerick, Wagner, and Wang address three characteristics of real-world speech:

1. Connected speech (Brown, 2012)

2. Hesitation phenomena (Griffiths, 1991)

3. Backchanneling (Truong, Poppe, & Heylen, 2010)

Emerick, Wagner, and Wang argue that students have trouble identifying each of these characteristics when listening to real-world English because they do not appear in written language. Therefore, it is necessary to provide direct and guided instruction on these linguistic features, even if students don't know anything about them beforehand. 

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How real-world audio compares to textbook audio, according to the research

Expanding Emerick, Wagner, and Wang's three real-speech characteristics, Sheppard and Wagner (2025) used nine discrete linguistic features to evaluate adult ESL textbooks' representation of authentic speech, including: 

1. Connected speech

2. Hesitation phenomena

3. Turn openers

4. Accent variety

5. Backchannels

6. Audio-visual input

7. Overlaps/latches

8. Speech rate

9. Slang

Sheppard and Wagner used this criteria to evaluate three of the most popular adult ESL textbooks at the intermediate and advanced levels: Cambridge University Press' Ventures series, Pearson's Future series, and National Geographic's Stand Out series. In their analysis, Sheppard and Wagner found that, while the texts featured some connected speech, they failed to adequately represent the other eight categories. In addition, all texts were far below the natural rate of speech in unscripted conversation, which Tauroza and Allison (1990) found to be around 209 words per minute (wpm).  Sheppard and Wagner found that Futures' average speech rate was around 145wpm, Ventures 149wpm, and Stand Out 170.

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Hear Here!'s approach

Hear Here! is modeled on Emerick, Wagner, and Wang's recommendation to explicitly instruct the linguistic features that distinguish spoken English from written English. After checking for understanding, lessons then focus on bringing students' awareness to one of six topics featured in the listening file:

1. Connected speech

2. Hesitation phenomena

3. Turn openers

4. Backchannels

5. Overlaps/latches

6. Slang/idioms

Hear Here! lessons feature audio-visual input, the average speech rate for natural conversation, and accent variety, but these elements are not the the focus of any lessons. 

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Hear Here! lessons are designed to accompany an existing adult ESL textbooks' curriculum. Teachers can access lessons that feature authentic listening at six levels, organized by 12 topics that commonly appear in adult ESL textbooks, making supplementation easy!​​

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References

Brown, J. D. (2013). New ways in teaching connected speech. TESL-EJ, 17(1), 1-4.

Emerick, M., Wagner, E., & Wang, L. (2018). Listening to real-world English, part 1: Connected speech. TESOL Connections. 

Emerick, M., Wagner, E., & Wang, L. (2018). Listening to real-world English, part 2: Filled pauses. TESOL Connections. 

Emerick, M., Wagner, E., & Wang, L. (2018). Listening to real-world English, part 3: Backchanneling. TESOL Connections. 

Field, J. (2003). Promoting perception: Lexical segmentation in L2 Listening. ELT Journal, 57(4), 325-334.

Griffiths, R. (1991). The paradox of comprehensible input: Hesitation phenomena in L2 teacher talk. JALT Journal, 13(1), 23-38.

Sheppard, R. & Wagner, E. (2025, Mar. 21). The Teaching of Real-World Listening in Adult ESOL Textbooks [Conference Presentation]. TESOL International Convention & Expo, Long Beach, CA, United States. 

Tauroza, S. & Allison, D. (1990). Speech rates in British English. Applied LInguistics, 11(1), 90-105.

Truong, K. P., Poppe, R. W., & Heylen, D. K. J. (2010). A rule-based backchannel prediction model using pitch and pause information. Interspeech, 26, 3058-3061.

Hear Here! is coming soon

Feel free to get in touch with questions in the meantime!