In school, ‘hearing’ and ‘listening’ are central activities students perform in meaning-oriented (e.g., listening to teachers’ instructions, to their classmates, to headmaster’s announcements, etc.) as well as passive (e.g., hearing noise like rustling paper, the clicks of a biro/ ballpoint pen during a class test, etc.) ways. Being constantly surrounded by noises inside and outside the classroom can stress the students and affect their ability to learn and work well, which is a central condition to provide a learning environment that is conscious of the students’ mental health. In the English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom, students perform cognitively challenging tasks when they listen to texts. The focus on the students’ comprehension performance often comprises using tasks and settings that could induce foreign language listening anxiety and by that increase this form of mental distress. To support the students in a) coping with noise-related stress, b) learn how to listen to a foreign language, and c) to reduce foreign language listening anxiety, this contribution aims at developing a mindful approach to teaching EFL listening. “Noise is an imposition on sanity, and we live in very noisy times.” Joan Baez (Baez 1968) One of the main requirements of being a student at school is to listen. This includes listening to the teachers’ instructions, announcements by the headmaster, texts played during listening comprehension activities, or to the remarks made by their friends, to name just a few. In addition to this meaningful way of listening, students are also confronted with hearing many sounds that are unavoidable at school which can be perceived as - noise (see section 3 of this contribution). According to OECD PISA data, almost 30% of students complained about noise in every or most lessons (OECD 2019). Schools can be seen as the students’ workplace, and in this context the European Agency for Safety and Health at work stresses that “[e]ven relatively low noise levels can cause problems in the workplace because the noise is annoying and disturbing. Noise can give rise to stress reactions that have a detrimental effect on the ability to concentrate and on productive efficiency” (EU OSHA 2013). Further studies have found that noise-related stress is linked to cardiovascular diseases as well as mental disorders such as anxiety or depression (see, e.g., Ahmad 2022). It can thus be argued that these noise-related stress reactions negatively impede on students’ mental health, which according to the WHO is “a state of mental well-being that enables people to cope with the stresses of life, realize their abilities, learn well and work well” (WHO 2022). Thus, as noise is a crucial factor at school that has the power to affect the students’ mental health (see, e.g., Basner, Babisch, Davis, Brink, Clark, Janssen & Stansfeld 2014; Lim, Kweon, Kim, Cho, Park & Sim 2018), it should be reflected on in class in order to raise awareness of its potential effects. It seems reasonable to focus on this aspect in lessons dedicated to listening, which is, for several reasons, typically done in foreign language classes and not necessarily in other subjects. Mental health, according to the WHO’s definition, also depends on a realization of ones’ own abilities. In EFL contexts, this would require the students to realize that they are able to listen in a foreign language and learn how they can improve this competence area. This aspect is often neglected in teaching practice because it tends to focus more on testing listening than teaching how to do it. When focusing on listening in the EFL classroom, it can be said that students are expected to listen to a variety of recorded texts that are (more or less) interesting to them and (more or less) resemble real life contexts. 1 A common technique of EFL teaching practice regarding listening is to assess the students’ comprehension of the information covered in the recordings by using comprehension task formats such as multiple-choice, multiple-matching, short answer questions, etc. (see Field 2008; Folkerts & Matz forth.). One of the downsides of this practice is that the students’ answers are often limited to a strictly correct/ incorrect binary opposition with nothing in-between (see, e.g., Field 2008). This strong focus on right or wrong is one of the factors that can lead to foreign language listening anxiety (FLLA; see, e.g., Elkhafaifi 2005; Bekleyen 2009) because it might increase the students’ worry about not 1 It should be noted that many recordings are specially produced for EFL purposes and consist of adapted speech (e.g., easier vocabulary, reduced grammatical complexity, fewer elements of natural speech, etc.). These often-scripted dialogues usually align with the topic of the teaching unit at hand and do not necessarily match with the students’ interests. performing well enough in foreign language listening; it also highlights deficits in listening, typically without providing the students with information how to overcome these deficits. This often leaves students without any support as to how they can actively improve their listening competence (see, e.g., Folkerts & Matz forth.). FLLA is an empirically validated construct that is part of foreign language anxiety and is known to negatively affect the students’ mental health (see section 4 in this contribution). In the context of mental health, it can be regarded as a mental disorder. The WHO adds to their definition of mental health that it “is more than the absence of mental disorders. It exists on a complex continuum, which is experienced differently from one person to the next, with varying degrees of difficulty and distress and potentially very different social and clinical outcomes” (WHO 2022). In the context of school, it should be highlighted that foreign language anxiety is a frequently occurring mental disorder (see, e.g., Horwitz, Horwitz & Cope 1986) that often also comprises FLLA (see, e.g., Kimura 2017), and is also experienced individually with varying degrees. Teaching EFL listening in mindful ways should be aware of anxiety-inducing learning settings and also focus on those aspects of teaching this competence which raise the students’ awareness as to how foreign language listening can be learned. This contribution will thus suggest theory-based principles for a mindful EFL listening classroom which concentrates on coping with mental health risks, including a) noise as a stressor, b) lack of learning how to listen in a foreign language well, and c) FLLA as an affective issue. Therefore, after a brief description of the listening process, a point will be made for fostering mindfulness in EFL listening. Mindful listening builds the foundation for listening instructions that focus on positively contributing to the students’ mental health by providing strategies to deal with noise-related stress. Additionally, this contribution will elaborate on how paying conscious attention to the learning process of this competence rather than testing it might help to reduce the students’ FLLA, and by that not only contributes to the students’ ability to learn well and work well, but also to realize their ability to listen in a foreign language. When describing the listening process, first, a distinction has to be made between ‘hearing’ and ‘listening.’ Hearing, in very broad terms, can be defined as the “physical and neurological systems and processes that are involved in hearing sound” (Rost 2016: 3). Depending on the composition of the sounds, these can be perceived as noise. A sound can be perceived as noise because of its ‘loudness’ or ‘volume’ (e.g., an airplane flying too low; see, e.g., EU OSHA 2013). Too high volume can be perceived as too loud for the ear, and people instantly wish to cover their ears to protect them. Also, a sound becomes a noise when its frequencies are in a range that are out of the regular ranges (i.e., ‘tonality’; see Oliva, Hongisto & Haapakangas 2017) or there are too many frequencies at the same time which create cacophony (‘spectrum’; see Hongisto, Oliva & Recola 2015). Third, steady-state sounds (e.g., a heater or a broken/ damaged lamp) as well as impulsive sounds (e.g., the constant clicking of a biro/ ballpoint pen) can be perceived as noise as well 2 (see Virjonen, Hongisto & Radun 2019; Rajala & Hongisto 2020; Radun Maula, Rajala, Scheinin & Hongisto 2022). In many cases, these noise sources occur at the same time or have the same origin. Students in school are confronted with many of these different sources of noise, and they need to learn which sounds are stressors and develop adequate coping strategies for this noise-related stress (see section 3 of this contribution). Perceived sounds are processed further and can be differentiated into ‘speech’ and all other sounds which might support as well as challenge the following processes. Listening is concerned with the further processing of speech in connection with developing representations of meaning of what has been said. However, other sounds can also contribute to the meaning building process which is why listening for meaningful sounds in a specific context is also possible. The representations of meaning can be seen as an individual interpretation by the listener (with varying room for interpretation which to a large extent depends on the input). To initiate this meaningmaking process, the listener must, to some degree, have the ‘intention to start listening’ to the speech input (Kriegel 2013). With regards to the temporal dimension, hearing and listening are pastas well as future-oriented and are grounded in an awareness of real time; sounds that are perceived in the now must be retrospectively analysed and at the same time require an anticipation of what can be heard next (Cariani & Micheyl 2012). Raising the students’ awareness of the temporal dimension of hearing provides the opportunity for students to be mindful of their present environment and how it affects their level of stress. When processing speech, listening involves three different process phases which are influenced by each other’s products: perception, parsing, and utilization. In the perception phase, the listeners perceive the acoustic input and develop a phonetic representation of what has been said. This phonetic representation will be further processed in the parsing phase which involves the lexical search and a grammatical analysis of the phonetic representation. In both phases, linguistic knowledge (e.g., phonetic, lexical, grammatical, semantic knowledge) is crucial to be able to further 2 In their experimental study on steady-state noise and impulsive noise, Rajala & Hongisto (2020) found that impulsive noise is perceived as more annoying. Onset rate and level difference are important factors that contribute to the perception of impulsive noise as annoying. process the speech input. Less experienced EFL listeners in particular face challenges in this phase as they often have only a limited amount of linguistic knowledge (see, e.g., Field 2008; Goh & Vandergrift 2022; Rossa 2012). In the third phase, ‘utilization’, the listeners are required to integrate information of what has been said and decoded so far with their existing ‘prior knowledge’ (e.g., world, pragmatic, discourse knowledge). In EFL learning contexts, it can be said that limited prior knowledge poses a threat to developing cohesive representations of meaning, which is why contextualization plays a vital role in facilitating the L2 listening process (see Goh & Vandergrift 2022: 65-67). The processes described so far happen naturally and automatically in the L1; however, in the L2 context, the learners usually struggle with the automatic processing of the perceived speech (Field 2008; Rossa & Matz 2023), e.g., due to limited language knowledge in the foreign language. It should therefore be the goal of every L2 listening curriculum to foster the learners’ listening competence so that they are able to automatically process the speech input and become more fluent listeners (Field 2008, Goh & Vandergrift 2022). Nonetheless, until the learners are able to process speech automatically, they will oftentimes rely on controlled processing, for example, by trying to translate single words or phrases. This, of course, leads to higher cognitive load, which challenges higher order thinking processes such as those used in the utilization phase. This is why Goh and Vandergrift (2022) emphasize that L2 learners will profit from the integration of metacognitive listening strategies. Metacognition can be seen as the listeners’ “ability to think about [their] own thinking or ‘cognition’ and by extension, to think about how [they] process information for a range of purposes and manage the way [they] do it” (Goh & Vandergrift 2022: 87). It thus underlies the whole listening process and enables the listener to actively influence the cognitive processes that are involved. By using their metacognitive knowledge, which consists of strategies that control their thinking, listeners can apply these to facilitate and enhance the listening process and by that provides them with agency for listening. Being aware of when to use which metacognitive strategy is reported to have positive impact on the listening process and provides the students with reassurance that they can learn how to listen (see, e.g., Cross 2010; Bozorgian 2014; Goh & Hu 2014; Chen 2019; Maftoon & Alamdari 2020). It must further be emphasized that the three described processes (perception, parsing, and utilization) influence each other in two directions (usually referred to as bottom-up and top-down processing) which result in storing a representation of what has been said in long term memory. Knowing the context of the listening situation, for example, will influence the utilization phase and therefore shape to a certain extent what the listeners expect to hear (Goh & Vandergrift 2022: 65-67). The results of the listening process are representations of meaning which are influenced by the listeners prior knowledge and are thus highly individual. Depending on the input, there is more or less room for the listeners interpretation of what has been said. Thus, listening is an approximate process that listeners often only realize actively when a communication or meaning-building breakdown is imminent. When designing instructions for teaching listening in a mindful way, it is important for teachers to know the goals for listening which are to a large extent based on the characteristics of the listening text. In summary, focusing on the difference between hearing and listening in the EFL classroom can provide information to establish a learning setting that enables the students to cope with noise-related stress. Meaning-oriented listening is a complex process that involves a variety of cognitive and metacognitive processes which support the listener to process spoken input and build representations of meaning. The foreign language listener is confronted with several challenges throughout the whole process. Raising the students’ awareness of these challenges by focusing on automatic processing as well helping them use metacognitive strategies for listening can improve their agency in the listening process. This section specifically focuses on developing the students’ competence to cope with noise as a stressor. Therefore, the differentiation between listening and hearing is needed to teach EFL listening in mindful ways. In the following section, central aspects that contribute to a mindful listening classroom will be outlined. Mindfulness, as it will be established in this section, can be defined as a person’s ability to focus the attention on the present and accept this experience, as well as the “ability to identify and differentiate among emotions and successfully regulate negative emotions” (Coffey, Hartman & Fredrickson 2010: 250-251) that are triggered by this present-centered attention and experience. First, I argue that it is important to raise the students’ awareness of loudness as being on a continuum to make them aware of what noise is and how it can affect their mental health. Second, I contend that an EFL classroom that is mindful of listening should further focus on the differentiation between hearing and listening, as becoming aware of this difference will help the students to identify noise sources, develop coping strategies, and learn how to use sounds in a meaningful way to support their listening comprehension. Finally, I show that an awareness of both aspects, loudness as a continuum and hearing versus listening, enables the students to practice mindful hearing and listening in their surrounding environment, which has the potential to not only help them comprehend better, but also profit from experiencing less FLLA and thus improved well-being. In schools, there will always be sounds that create a certain level of background noise. This background noise usually has levels of around 35-50db (see, Augustyńska, Kaczmarska, Mikulski & Radosz 2010; Shield, Conetta, Dockrell, Connolly, Cox & Mydlarz 2015). In order to make themselves heard, teachers as well as students need to be louder than this threshold level. Depending on the classroom’s acoustic conditions as well as the collaborative situation in the lesson, the background noise might even exceed the aforementioned levels. In group work phases, the background noise can easily exceed 55-65db (Augustyńska et al. 2010; Shield et al. 2015), which will lead the students to increasingly raise their voice even higher and by that ultimately increase the noise level. Many practitioners are aware of this effect and, for example, aim at speaking only as loud as necessary for group work phases to reduce the noise level (Huber & Haag 2010; a common practitioners’ technique is to aim at establishing a ‘30-cm voice’ that only neighbours can hear in group work phases). There is, however, no systematic approach that concentrates on the students’ awareness of the loudness level. As volume (i.e., the loudness of a listening text) is a central element of the listening classroom, it lends itself to establishing such an awareness. A first important step of such an awareness training would be to create a baseline that establishes the quietest possible noise level. By letting the students reflect on this baseline with regards to their level of stress, students can be made aware of how loudness might contribute to mental distress. From this baseline, students can then refocus on hearing sounds that go beyond this quiet threshold level. By identifying these sounds (e.g., paper rustling, tapping, etc.), students can be made aware of specific factors that increase the baseline and accordingly avoid making these sounds, which will lead to less noise in class. If implemented at early foreign language learning levels, this practice can also be used to learn the names of specific sounds and corresponding verbs and adjectives. Another aspect that helps to establish a mindful listening classroom is using the distinction between hearing and listening for teaching listening. A core element that is needed to establish the differentiation between hearing and listening is to use audible texts that contain sounds as well as speech. Using texts with background noise is already common practice when testing as well as teaching listening comprehension (see, e.g., Field 2019). However, in most cases the instructions of the exercises and tasks accompanying the listening texts solely focus on the speech decoding and listening comprehension dimension and are therefore limited. Raising the students’ awareness of how background sounds can impair as well as benefit their comprehension will contribute to the students’ metacognitive knowledge and thus their application of metacognitive strategies. Depending on the sounds, they might, on the one hand, obstruct understanding as they conflict with the speech that the students are supposed to understand. Knowing which sounds must be actively ignored or listened around will help the students to develop metacognitive strategies how to deal with this common phenomenon of speech reception. On the other hand, background sounds can also support the comprehension of what has been said if they provide additional context information that helps to understand the speech. Again, focusing on how to use these sounds for the listening comprehension process increases the students’ agency of their listening process. By providing students with discrimination training that focuses on the differentiation between background noise that impairs comprehension and background sounds that support comprehension, students can be made aware of the thin line between hearing and listening, which is crossed as soon as the sounds are perceived in a meaningful way. Teachers implementing such discrimination training will also provide fair preparation for listening comprehension exams in which this competence level is tested (see, e.g., the competence descriptions of the CEFR level B2 for overall oral comprehension which are often used as guidelines for test development; Council of Europe 2020: 48). When students are used to applying different strategies depending on whether the background sounds are noise or context information, they will be less likely to become stressed by background sounds in the exam situation. This will reduce both FLLA (see section 4) and test anxiety (see In’nami 2006) as well and thus help to reduce mental distress. Students that are aware of loudness as a continuum as well as the differentiation between hearing and listening can use this to practice mindfulness. There are a variety of mindfulness-based interventions which are reported to have a positive impact on mental health (for an overview, see, e.g., Coffey et al. 2010: 235). Most of these interventions focus on the awareness of factors that positively or negatively contribute to a person’s mental wellbeing. In a mindful listening classroom that focuses on the positive and negative impact of the environment on the students’ mental health, the relationship between what surrounds us and how it affects us is crucial. 3 It does, however, not only affect the auditive but also the visual sense, as the interplay of both senses contributes to cognitive load. Depending on the setting, excessive cognitive load could cause stress and impair mental well- 3 Beard (2019) refers to sounds that derive from sources we cannot see as acousmatic sound. He argues that “[a]cousmatic listening moves from a reflexive activity to a reflective activity” (Beard 2019: 131) because it surpasses cognitive shortcuts. In the context of this contribution, this reflective activity is practiced by focusing on immersion into soundscapes, which is a specific form of acousmatic listening that connects the students to their surroundings. being. For example, what students see does not necessarily equal with what they hear: In a face-to-face conversation, students see who is talking to them, they can thus be aware of the context, the surroundings, etc. However, on their way to school, students might listen to some music via headphones, which, for example, does not match with what they see outside or inside the bus; this can either be stressful or have a relieving function depending on the students’ constitution and state of mind (see, e.g., Beard 2019). In class, students usually read and see comprehension tasks when listening to a corresponding text, but they do not actually see the people who speak, which is why listening comprehension is seen as cognitively challenging (see, e.g., Rossa 2012; Beard 2019; Field 2019). The congruency between what can be seen and what can be heard is highly relevant when it comes to the cognitive load the two senses produce as this generates different levels of stress. Teaching hearing and listening in a mindful way can use the awareness of noise sources (‘loudness as a continuum’) and disturbing sounds (‘difference between hearing and listening’) to focus on how to deal with stress that is produced by cognitive overload caused by the auditory and visual senses. This form of mindfulness is the basis for a listening classroom that focuses on the student’s mental well-being, as it provides the students with the necessary present-centred self-awareness of identifying which sounds increase their mental distress. In the following paragraph, a specific training intervention will be described that can foster (EFL) students’ mindfulness and could benefit their mental well-being. First, the differentiation between hearing and listening should be used to raise the students’ awareness of their audible surroundings. By closing their eyes, they can practice hearing the soundscape 4 that surrounds them and practice focusing their attention on the present. Also, by immersing themselves into the soundscape, they can then reflect on how they experience it and how it relates to their mental state. While the students are immersing themselves into the soundscape, they can listen for specific sound details and can be asked to identify these, note them down and evaluate how they affect their mental state. This will make them aware of their immediate environment and promotes mindfulness with regards to the here and now: What surrounds me and how does it affect me? One effect of this practice is that the students’ attention on specific sounds elevates them from a subconscious, passive mode of hearing to a more conscious mode 4 A soundscape can be seen as an audible equivalent to a landscape. The work of R. Murray Schafer (1977) largely contributed to defining the term. There are different source types of sounds that compose a soundscape: On the one hand, there are natural sounds produced by non-organic material (e.g., waves, wind, etc.) as well as natural sounds produced by organic sources (e.g., the chatter of birds). Both sound sources are not human related; thus, all sounds produced by humans (e.g., speech) or caused by humans or human inventions (e.g., urban sounds) are seen as different source types of soundscapes (see, e.g., Pijanowski, Villanueva-Rivera, Dumyahn, Farina, Krause, Napoletano, Gage & Pieretti 2011; Kang & Schulte-Fortkamp 2016). of listening and therefore becomes a reflective activity. By doing so, students will gain agency over what they are listening to and can actively engage in dealing with the sounds on a cognitive level. In the next step, teachers should make use of different recorded soundscapes (e.g., from cities, beaches, woods, etc.). This aims at differentiating more sounds that can affect our mental well-being either positively or negatively. It is important to provide the students with ample time to immerse themselves into the soundscape so that they are able to feel the effect the soundscape has on their body and mind (see Beard 2019). It should be noted that sounds from natural soundscapes are reported to have stronger positive effects with regards to physical as well as mental health than urban sounds because they are reported to reduce stress and annoyance (see Buxton, Pearson, Allou, Fristrup & Wittemeyer 2021). Immerging into these soundscapes first aims at raising the students’ awareness of their stress level. By changing from a passive mode of hearing to a meaningful way of listening, the students will gain agency and by that learn how to reduce their stress level. Additionally, this activity should of course be regarded in a language learning related context. Instructions therefore could include, for example, identifying and naming sounds (especially suited for younger learners), reflecting about the effects of the landscape with peers (aiming at interactive competences; expressing feelings and emotions in a foreign language), or creative tasks (e.g., storytelling that involves sounds heard in the soundscape). A third step in a mindfulness training for listening can be seen as a counterpart to immersion into a soundscape as the students actively engage with the soundscape and start analysing it. First, students should practice fading in and out of background noise by being aware of loudness as a continuum. This can be achieved by letting them focus on specific sounds of a landscape while ignoring other sounds that are louder or quieter. Second, by adding speech at a medium volume into the soundscape, a helpful trigger for meaning-oriented tasks can be included (see section 4). This last step of such a mindfulness training for listening fosters the students’ agency over their listening process. In doing so, the students can develop strategies which they need to cope with noise-related stress. Moreover, this mindfulness training can help students cope with stress caused by background noises in testing situations. - Beyond the listening processes (see section 2), the construct of foreign language listening anxiety (FLLA) as a specific form and subtype of foreign language anxiety (Kimura 2017) is of relevance for this contribution, as FLLA can be seen as an affective issue that should be actively mitigated in a mindful EFL listening classroom. According to Kim (2000), two dominant factors that influence the students’ FLLA are “tension and worry over English listening” as well as “lack of confidence in listening” (Kim 2000: 146). These factors are influenced, for example, by missing keywords in the text, limited processing time, and limited background knowledge (Kim 2000: 146). In a later study, Kimura (2017: 143-146) added two further factors that contribute to FLLA: ‘Self-Focused Apprehension’ (SFA) as well as ‘Task- Focused Apprehension’ (TFA). The latter in particular can be seen as the students’ “worry about poor L2 listening performance […], which is specific to L2 listening tasks” (Kimura 2017: 145). Kimura found that TFA affects both lower proficiency learners as well as higher proficiency learners. While the high TFA of lower proficiency learners can be explained with limited linguistic resources and prior knowledge, the surprisingly high TFA of higher proficiency learners is ascribed to a lack of automatic processing (see Kimura 2017: 153-155). As a result, teaching listening in a mindful way should focus on a) the students’ automatic processing (which can be achieved by learning how to listen), and b) their agency in the listening process (which can be achieved through focusing on metacognitive strategy use), both of which will be elaborated on in the following paragraph. Developing representations of meaning in the listening process requires the listeners’ understanding of information that is encoded in the input, or briefly, their interpretation of said text. In the EFL context, the bottom-up and top-down processing that is needed to build these representations of meaning are often referred to as ‘listening comprehension.’ For a long time, listening comprehension has been regarded as a passive process that does not need a lot of attention in EFL instruction (for a historic overview on the role of listening in EFL teaching, see, e.g., Flowerdew & Miller 2005; Hue 2019). Even though this misconception has been revised by several researchers (see, e.g., Rossa 2012; Rost 2016; Goh & Vandergrift 2022), listening comprehension in German EFL contexts, especially in lower secondary education, is often rather product-oriented and neglects the listener’s agency in this meaning making process (e.g., Folkerts & Matz forth.). This form of teaching listening therefore tends to assess whether the information that is encoded in speech was perceived correctly rather than either providing information about how it was perceived or whether the listeners were able to integrate the new information with existing knowledge to create cohesive representations of meaning. Listening instruction in the German EFL context is, to a large extent, driven by an isolated testing of listening comprehension (see, e.g., Folkerts & Matz forth.; Mertes 2019). This standardand validity-oriented assessment practice in the German secondary school context has a strong washback effect on the teaching practice. It can thus be argued that there is hardly a distinct separation of learning how to listen and testing the students’ listening comprehension, which is an important distinction for the development of lesson sequences (see Hallet 2018). The focus on listening comprehension and the corresponding assessment of whether the learners’ extraction of information from the text was successful is indeed a necessary practice in several contexts that are, for example, relevant to fulfil the schools’ function of selection and allocation. In learning contexts, however, focusing on the students’ correct extraction of information too often can be anxiety inducing (see Kimura 2017) and therefore not only negatively affects the learning process but also could increase the mental disorder FLLA. There are numerous approaches to teaching L2 listening. For the German secondary school context, arguably the comprehension approach (CA) is the most influential. In a small-scale study, Folkerts & Matz (forth.) found indications that this approach is still very dominant in the German EFL context. Field (2008) points out that, according to the CA, the best way of developing listening skills entails presenting learners with a recorded passage of about three minutes, then checking their understanding of the passage by means of a comprehension exercise. If a right answer is given […], teachers assume that understanding has been achieved and move on. If a wrong answer is given, teachers replay the part of the text that has caused difficulty. […] But the underlying supposition is that testing for understanding is the most appropriate form for the listening class to take. This supposition has rarely been questioned; so prevalent is it that teachers’ manuals often use the term ‘listening comprehension’ to refer to all work on listening skills. (Field 2008: 26, emphasis added) Apparent in this description of the CA is that there are merely two options for the learners: giving a right or a wrong answer. Hence the classroom practice that has evolved from this approach is testing rather than learning listening. Keeping in mind that lower as well as higher proficiency learners are generally affected by TFA (Kimura 2017), it can be assumed that confronting these students with task formats that evoke feelings of being tested in class are likely to increase FLLA. Concludingly, besides the merits of this approach when it comes to making judgements about the students’ competence level with regards to listening comprehension, it must be emphasized that it does not support learning to listen. To this end, it stands against the students’ state of mental well-being that consists of the ability to learn well and work well. In addition, it can be concluded that it increases mental distress and can lead to mental disorders based on anxiety. As individuals might perceive FLLA to different degrees, teachers must pay attention to the fact that students who are more prone to experience FLLA are not superimposed by those who can cope well with the stress caused by these task formats. It thus seems reasonable to include further approaches to teaching listening comprehension that make up for these downsides of the CA. As the TFA of lower proficiency learners is especially affected by their limited linguistic and prior knowledge and even higher proficiency learners still face challenges of automatic processing, it can be concluded that instruction should focus on these listening processes. To support the students in learning how to listen in a foreign language, Field (2008) developed the so-called ‘process approach’ (PA) to teaching L2 listening. By “dividing listening into a number of contributory elements that can be practised intensively,” (Field 2008: 111) a major goal of the PA is to provide the learners with process-specific learning settings that strengthen the students’ automatic processing. With regards to the decoding processes, listening activities that focus on phoneme, syllable, word-form, chunk, syntax, or intonation level can be used to foster this process dimension (Field 2008: 114). On the meaning-building level, two main goals can be differentiated: meaning enrichment and information handling (Field 2008: 116). Activities that specifically focus on the sub-processes of decoding and meaning building are usually referred to as micro listening activities. Micro here refers to the limited duration of the activity as well as the input and the limited focus on one specific level of decoding or meaning building (see Rossa & Matz 2023: 7). The PA concentrates on the competences and cognitive processes that EFL learners need to become more proficient and fluent listeners. It further aims at learning how to listen and can therefore be regarded as an approach that will positively affect the learners’ mental wellbeing in several ways. It can, for example, decrease FLLA because it reduces TFA and can also lead to less SFA. Furthermore, it boosts the students’ confidence in L2 listening and accordingly reduces worry about bad listening performance. As has been explained in section 2, focusing on an integration of metacognitive strategies for listening also has a very positive impact on the students’ listening process. Even though focusing on metacognitive strategies for listening is not an approach in itself, it will be referred to as the ‘metacognitive approach’ (MA) hereafter. Goh and Vandergrift (2022) differentiate five factors that are relevant for metacognitive awareness of listening: “problem-solving, planning and evaluation, mental translation, person knowledge, and directed attention” (Goh & Vandergrift 2022: 99). By fostering the students’ self-evaluation of these factors, for example, by using the items provided by the Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ, see Vandergrift, Goh, Mareschal & Tafaghodtari 2006; Goh & Vandergrift 2022), the learners will be supported in taking over agency of their listening process. This reportedly leads to “learners’ positive engagement with listening tasks as well as stronger interest, confidence, and motivation” (Goh & Vandergrift 2022: 106) and thus plays a vital role in developing an EFL listening classroom that focuses on the learners’ mental health. Implementing the MA can be achieved, for example, by using the metacognitive pedagogical sequence as proposed by Goh & Vandergrift (2022: 118-127), which has been validated in various studies (see, e.g., Mareschal 2007; Cross 2010; Tafaghodtari 2010; Bozorgian 2014). The different stages of the metacognitive pedagogical sequence focus on the key metacognitive processes of planning, monitoring, problem-solving, and evaluation. The sequence consists of five different stages that are focused on when listening to the text at least three times (see Goh & Vandergrift 2022: 119). Before the first listening, the context needs to be established and the learners are supposed to plan their listening as well as predicting what they will be listening to (see Goh & Vandergrift 2022: 119). After the first listen, the learners verify their results and plan (usually with peers) their second listen (see Goh & Vandergrift 2022: 119-120). After the second listen, the students again verify their predictions and reconstruct the text to a certain degree. This stage also might comprise comprehension activities (see Goh & Vandergrift 2022: 120-121). A third listen (which is especially helpful with a transcript) will, besides revealing information that is still missing (see Goh & Vandergrift 2022: 121), reassure the learners that they were already able to understand most of the relevant aspects and will therefore positively affect the students’ confidence in L2 listening. Designing an EFL listening classroom that is aware of its implications on the students’ mental health holds certain challenges for the teachers. To establish this mindful listening classroom, teachers need to focus on different aspects that have been outlined in this contribution: mindfulness, learnability, and anxiety reduction. Mindfulness - which is a rather new concept in the context of teaching foreign language listening - could serve as a basis for a mindful way of teaching EFL listening, as it focuses on the students’ ability to reflect on which aspects have a positive or negative effect on their mental health. Mindfulness with regards to listening may be fostered by raising the students’ awareness of loudness as a continuum and the differentiation between hearing and listening. By supporting students in mindfully experiencing and reflecting on different soundscapes, they can be enabled to actively engage with them. Activities in this context can help students to develop noise-related stress coping strategies. This form of mindfulness might have a positive impact on the students’ mental health for two reasons. First, the immersion into and reflection of (natural) soundscapes relieves of stress. Second, by gaining more agency over the listening process, listening anxiety can be reduced. FLLA can be reduced by providing tasks that focus on helping students learn the competence rather than testing it. By implementing tasks that are process-based and foster the use of metacognitive strategies for listening, the students’ TFA might be reduced as well as their test anxiety, which could be present in the everyday EFL listening classroom in case it solely focuses on comprehension activities. Reducing the students’ FLLA provides a safe space for the students in class and thus aims at positively contributing to the students’ mental health as it reduces mental distress. The theoretical concept presented in this contribution is envisaged as a first suggestion to design a mindful EFL listening classroom and would profit from further practice-oriented research that concentrates on specific tasks and instructions that are needed in this context. Additionally, the concept still needs empirical validation as the proposed principles for a mindful listening classroom have not yet been researched in the specific field of foreign language listening in combination with mental health. In this context, only foreign language listening anxiety has been researched and established as an empirically validated construct that is connected to the students’ mental health as it focuses on this affective issue. It would thus be worthwhile to explore whether FLLA can be reduced by teaching EFL listening in mindful ways as they are presented in this contribution. Ahmad, Samoon (2022). How Constant Noise Keeps Us Chronically Stressed. Noise pollution and the brain. [online] https: / / www.psychologytoday.com/ intl/ blog/ balanced/ 202212/ how-constant-noise-keeps-us-chronically-stressed [May 2023]. Augustyńska, Danuta, Anna Kaczmarska, Witold Mikulski & Jan Radosz (2010). Assessment of teachers’ exposure to noise in primary schools. 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