Linguistic Foundation of Foreign Language Listening Comprehension

One of the urgent contemporary educational problems, solving of which is important for foreign language teaching and learning is improving listening comprehension skills as it helps to develop communicative competence of foreign language learners. The aim of the article is to discuss the importance of using linguistic findings in the process of teaching foreign language listening comprehension. Thus, the leading approach to research the problem of the article is the linguistic one. It helps to show the peculiarities of the speech perception process in connection with the type of the language; these peculiarities should be taken into consideration when developing listening comprehension teaching techniques and programs. The article illustrates this approach with the findings on the perception peculiarities of the English words and sentences. The findings are discussed in terms of their implication in foreign language teaching. The materials of this article may be of use to those who are interested in the research on problems of speech perception and improving the existing listening comprehension teaching methods.