"My interest in second language listening dates back to my experience as a teacher of French and German in high schools in England, in the early 1990s. At that time, the fundamental question that bothered me was "Why do learners find listening so difficult?" My subsequent research gave me plenty of answers to that question, which has continued to preoccupy me over the last 30 years or so. All those answers coalesce, however, around one key issue, or so it seems to me: Namely the inherent complexity of listening in a second language on a number of different levels, not only in terms of the learner but also from the perspective of the teacher whose task it is to try to help learners improve their ability to comprehend spoken language. Given the ephemeral nature of spoken input, and the necessity to coordinate in real time a wide range of different kinds of linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge, it is not surprising that second language listening seems very difficult to improve"-- Provided by publisher.