Toward a new appreciation of speaking and listening

This chapter outlines the topic with a shared commitment to thinking about speaking and listening as a core concern in literacy and language teaching and as mediated by place and subjectivities. It explores speaking and listening variously as situated, communicative, dialogic, voice and silence, and performance. The chapter foregrounds work that strongly illustrates the importance of speaking and listening in educational spaces. It highlights a rich history in literacy studies that has been somewhat overlooked with a recent concentration on digital worlds and different forms of communication and aims to remind readers of the role of speaking and listening not as peripheral concern, but rather of chief importance. The chapter contends that to speak/address the issue of speaking and listening is to acknowledge power dynamics and constructs that overtly, covertly, shape the dialogic relationship and inherent tensions between speaker and listener, teacher and student, author and reader/viewer, and language-user and language learner based on the research.