The Academic Listening Task: A Case Study

This article reports on an ethnographic research project that investigated an ESL student's actual listening activities during one academic course at a U.S. university. Having successfully entered the university following a period of ESL instruction, the (Arabic‐speaking) student became a master's candidate. Examination of his notebooks, together with interviews and recordings of lectures, revealed that rather than being preoccupied with the acquisition of new facts, he was engaging in a variety of processes relating both to the material and to the teacher. These processes involved the reduction of incoming linguistic data, the making of new connections within already familiar concepts, and an identification with the teacher's viewpoints. The findings lead to the idea that content‐based listening classes would be helpful in ESL preparatory programs, and the guiding principles for the design of such courses are suggested.