The Educational Soundscape: Participation and Perception in Japanese High School English Lessons

In this article I discuss the emergence of practices of hearing in the midst of English language learning activities. I focus on listening activities during oral English lessons at two public high schools in Tokyo, Japan. One setting is a liberal arts high school. The other is a technical high school where students are trained in specializations such as industrial chemistry and electrical engineering. The different organization of listening activities in each of the schools has consequences for the different shape, texture, and categorization of what is heard. I show how hearing, therefore, is an act not solely located the moment sound meets the ear of an individual. Rather, it is socially rationed, controlled, and imagined through the joint actions of participants before, during, and after such physiological hearing takes place. This constitutes hearing as a social act, cognitively distributed among participants and over space and time in the classroom.