John Field
Field
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.
Career
- Trained English language teacher holding the Cambridge/RSA Diploma
- Materials writer and syllabus designer across multiple contexts, including a BBC radio series for beginners, distance-learning materials for Chinese television, and national secondary school coursebooks for Saudi Arabia
- PhD, University of Cambridge, on lexical segmentation in first and foreign language listening
- Founder and convenor of the Psycholinguistics Special Interest Group of the British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL); past member of the BAAL Executive Committee
- Reader in Cognitive Approaches to Language Learning, CRELLA, University of Bedfordshire; also teaches at Reading and Cambridge
Published Work
- "'Bottom-up' and 'top-down'" (1999), ELT Journal 53(4)
- "Promoting perception: lexical segmentation in L2 listening" (2003), ELT Journal 57(4): 325–334
- Psycholinguistics: The Key Concepts (Routledge, 2004)
- Listening in the Language Classroom (Cambridge University Press, 2008) — winner of the 2008 Ben Warren International House Trust Prize
- Rethinking the Second Language Listening Test: From Theory to Practice (British Council Monographs on Modern Language Testing, 2019)
Influence
- His process approach, built on a perception–parsing–utilisation model, stands as the main alternative to the comprehension-question orthodoxy
- Central voice on decoding and bottom-up skills in L2 listening pedagogy
- Sits in the contemporary listening conversation alongside Vandergrift and Goh on metacognition and Cauldwell on spontaneous speech, pulling the field toward the signal itself
- His critique of listening-test design has fed directly into cognitive-validity work on IELTS, TOEFL, and Aptis