This is a proposal for an action research plan designed to find out how to improve students' listening comprehension skills, enhance their performance and help to promote better learning. This plan is focused on the minority students who major in English in our University. Listening comprehension is one of the most difficult courses for them. As…

This study examines the effects of learners' production (i.e., pushed output) during a multi-stage reconstruction task on learners' noticing of Spanish past tense morphology, aural text comprehension, and development of preterite/imperfect usage in writing. Participants included 47 intermediate L2 Spanish learners in a content-based course at the…

While recent studies have found that viewing glosses with multimedia annotations can help students learn and retain vocabulary words (Chun & Plass, 1996; Al-Seghayer, 2001), O'Bryan (2005) found that when providing pictorial glosses for select words within an online reading unit, few students took advantage of the clickable gloss function allowed…

Japanese university students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) encountered 10 target words in 3 sets of 10 short contexts that were rated on the amount of information available to infer the target words' meanings. One group of learners met the target words in contexts rated more highly than the contexts read by the other group. A…

This comprehensive resource explores how adolescence and academic achievement are defined within today's political context, examines the in-school potential of teens' out-of-school immersion in digital technologies and popular culture, and shows teachers how to embed comprehension strategies into classroom instruction. The book contains innovative…

Two empirical studies were conducted in which the differences in Japanese EFL learners' look-up behavior between hand-held electronic dictionaries (EDs) and printed dictionaries (PDs) were investigated. We focus here on the relation between learners' look-up frequency and degree of reading comprehension of the text. In the first study, a total of…

In this article, the author shows how vocabulary learning and reading can be combined into an effective, comprehension activity. Two steps are involved: first, individual reading and self-study of vocabulary at home, and, second, exchanging readings and helping each other with comprehension in class. The success of the activity relies on the…

Recent curricular discussions have addressed the linguistic, textual, and cultural knowledge that German Studies programs aim to impart. This article proposes that we focus not only on the knowledge that students are expected to gain but also on the development of student abilities to transform information into knowledge. It will explain the…

Recent research supports what many teachers already know---that students with a developed understanding that words are combinations of meaningful parts tend to have better vocabularies and stronger reading comprehension performance. These meaningful parts are called morphemes, and the study of them is called morphology. Teaching students to…

This quasi-experimental study attempts to incorporate grammatical elements into meaning-focused reading classes by attracting learner attention to form with minimal interruption to meaning comprehension. Two hundred fifty-nine Korean English as a foreign language students underwent four different treatments--involving textual enhancement and topic…

This study examines the relationship between how learners of Japanese as a second language perceive the learning of "kanji" (i.e., the logographic characters shared with Chinese) and their ability to learn novel "kanji" words using morphological and contextual information. Eighty college students learning Japanese as a foreign language completed a…

Studies conducted concerning numbers of limited-English-speaking-ability (LESA) students and utility of criteria for estimating this population are discussed. A sample of 287 students in kindergarten through grade three, whose parents had responded to a Language Resource Questionnaire, were selected for study. The teacher of each student was…

This is a presentation of the results of a factor analysis of a battery of tests intended to measure listening and reading comprehension in English as a second language. The analysis sought to answer the following questions: (1) whether the factor analysis method yields results when applied to tests which are not specifically designed for this…

This volume is part of a revision of the 1968 edition of "Elementary Modern Standard Arabic." It consists of 30 lessons covering the basic grammatical structures of Modern Standard Arabic, and presupposes a knowledge of the phonological and writing systems. The first priority is the comprehension of written materials, but other skills…

The report, entirely in French, describes Alberta's curriculum for ninth-year French immersion, as revised in 1998. An introductory section offers background information on the curriculum revision, links between the core curriculum and French immersion, underlying principles of second language instruction, the revised curriculum's objectives and…