This study investigated the impact of information density on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) listening comprehension, testing the hypothesis that listeners prioritize message understanding in information-rich discourse over grammar-focused analysis in rhetorical discourse. A quasi-experimental design was employed with 26 EFL college students,…

Aural vocabulary knowledge (AVK) of high-frequency words is critical for second language listening comprehension. However, learners of English as a foreign language (EFL), despite considerable periods of language study, often do not have the AVK needed for basic communicative competence. A mixed methods approach is applied to determine whether…

The primary goal of this project is to assess the students' better communication attainment after applying a series of five interactive strategies to an experiment group of subjects. This class will be compared with a control group of other participants, and in their class, the interactive approaches are not emphasized and practiced openly. The…

Lexical inferencing is considered a listening strategy that is commonly employed by advanced EFL (English as a Foreign Language) listeners and a factor that contributes to successful listening comprehension. However, investigations of the factors that influence inferencing success in listening as well as how much each factor contributes to success…

This paper investigates the effect of sentence complexity, specifically lexical and syntactic surprisal, on L2 listening difficulty. Psycholinguistic studies revealed that surprisal cases correlate with textual comprehension difficulty. Based on surprisal theory, these cases are less probable or expected, considering the precedent context, thus…

This paper introduces a new captioning tool, Partial and Synchronized Caption with Hints (PSCH), as a means to facilitate second language (L2) listening by providing cues for ambiguous and difficult words/phrases in the caption while filtering out the easy words. Each word in the caption is synchronized to the corresponding audio to enable…

This study examines strategies (inferencing and ignoring) and knowledge sources (semantics, morphology, paralinguistics, etc.) that second language learners of English use to process unfamiliar words in listening comprehension and whether the use of strategies or knowledge sources relates to successful text comprehension or word comprehension.…

This study examines the effect of contextual clues on the use of strategies (inferencing and ignoring) and knowledge sources (semantics, morphology, world knowledge, and others) for processing unfamiliar words in listening comprehension. Three types of words were investigated: words with local co-text clues, global co-text clues and extra-textual…

This study investigated how listener experience (extent of previous exposure to non-native speech) and semantic context (degree and type of semantic information available) influence measures of intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness of non-native (L2) speech. Participants were 24 native English-speaking listeners, half experienced…

Articles include: (1) "L'elaboration du materiel pedagogique pour des publics adultes" (The Elaboration of Teaching Materials for the Adult Public) by G. Painchaud-Leblanc, (2) "L'elaboration d'un programme d'etudes en francais langue seconde a partir des donnees recentes en didactique des langues" (The Elaboration of a Program…

Representatives from major institutions teaching African languages convened to discuss the design of African language textbooks and to propose guidelines for the writing of new textbooks and evaluation of existing ones. Conference papers include: "Language Acquisition Theory and Materials Construction" (Stephen Krashen); "The Structures of Verbal…

Papers presented at the conference on applied linguistics include the following: "Speaking of Grammars: Is Big Beautiful?" (Jan Svartvik); "A Sociosemiotic View of the Grasp of Language at Reality: The Lexical Field 'Aesthetic Judgment'" (Wolfgang Kuhlwein); "Language as a Target and Instrument of the Educational Process…