Laurens "Larry" Vandergrift (1947–2015) was a Canadian applied linguist whose work made L2 listening a properly researchable skill instead of a testing artefact. He spent most of his career at the University of Ottawa's Official Languages and Bilingualism Institute, where he built a research programme around how learners actually manage listening in real time and how teachers can intervene in that process.
Vandergrift's signature move was to treat listening as something learners could be taught to regulate, not merely exposed to. With Christine Goh he formalized a metacognitive approach that gave teachers a concrete cycle to run in class, and with colleagues he built the measurement instrument (the MALQ) that let the field track the construct empirically.