John Field is a British applied linguist whose research has reshaped how L2 listening is taught and tested. He holds a PhD from Cambridge on lexical segmentation in L1 and L2 listening, teaches psycholinguistics and child language at the University of Reading, is attached to the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, and is a Reader in Cognitive Approaches to Language Learning at CRELLA, University of Bedfordshire.
Field's distinctive contribution is to insist that listening is a cognitive process, not a product. He argues that classroom listening has spent decades grading the answers to comprehension questions while leaving the perceptual work of actually decoding speech almost untaught.