Music educators often use guided listening strategies as a means of enhancing engagement during music listening activities. Although previous research suggests that these strategies are indeed helpful in facilitating some form of cognitive and emotional engagement, little is known about how these strategies might function for music of differing…

This book innovatively connects the two fields of oracy and practice-oriented empirical research in English language education. It creates synergies and proposes innovative approaches to the study of oracy in the context of learning and teaching English as a second, additional or foreign language. The book also develops a contemporary and holistic…

Purpose: The purpose of this article was to examine the neural mechanisms associated with increases in speech intelligibility brought about through alphabet supplementation. Method: Neurotypical participants listened to dysarthric speech while watching an accompanying video of a hand pointing to the 1st letter spoken of each word on an alphabet…

You don't want this book--you need this book. Why this confident claim? Think about how many times you've walked away from school conversations, sensing they could be more productive, but at a loss for how to improve them. Enter instructional coaching expert Jim Knight, who in "Better Conversations" honors our capacity for improving our…

This paper outlines the scale of the adult literacy and numeracy issue in New Zealand and describes a policy intervention designed to upskill employees in workplaces to help resolve the issue for them. This is the Workplace Literacy and Numeracy (WLN) Fund, which enables around 7000 employees a year to complete a 25- to 80-hour learning programme,…

Listening comprehension (LC) is considered an important but complex skill that predicts later reading comprehension in various languages. In this study, we aimed at understanding the relationship of LC with different linguistic and cognitive components. For this purpose, 262 Arabic-speaking kindergartners participated in this study. Our regression…

Through Many-Facet Rasch analysis, this study explores the rating differences between 1 computer automatic rater and 5 expert teacher raters on scoring 119 students in a computerized English listening-speaking test. Results indicate that both automatic and the teacher raters demonstrate good inter-rater reliability, though the automatic rater…

This study explored the attitudes of ethnic Latvian listeners towards Latvian-Russian bilinguals. Fifty-seven ethnic Latvians completed an identity questionnaire to obtain estimates of their ethnic beliefs and rated the speech of eight Latvian-Russian bilinguals for personal traits, judged how well social and ethnic labels apply to bilinguals, and…

Scholars and journalists alike have pointed out the poor state of political discourse in contemporary American politics. Younger generations echo these concerns, reporting that they choose to avoid engaging in political discussion because it is too partisan and riddled with rhetoric to be productive. While many offer little hope that the level of…

We investigated the contributions of multiple strands of factors--individual characteristics (struggling reader status, working memory, vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, knowledge-based inference, theory of mind, comprehension monitoring), a text feature (narrative vs. expository genre), and question types (literal and inferential)--to one's…

The concept of teaching and learning has changed drastically over the past few years by the virtue of both research results carried out in the fields of second/foreign language learning and acquisition. Of all these researches, findings related to the brain structure and functions in cooperation with cognitive aspects of the education process,…

The Listening Circle is a learning activity that is designed to provide students with the opportunity to connect listening knowledge with observed behaviors and to strengthen student peer feedback. Not knowing how to give feedback can result in messages that are confusing, tactless, and counter-productive. Many feedback messages leave the receiver…

In this study we investigated the potential for a shared-first-language (shared-L1) effect on second language (L2) listening test scores using differential item functioning (DIF) analyses. We did this in order to understand how accented speech may influence performance at the item level, while controlling for key variables including listening…

Nonverbal and other visual cues are well established as a critical component of human communication. Under most circumstances, visual information is available to aid in the comprehension and interpretation of spoken language. Citing these facts, many L2 assessment researchers have studied video-mediated listening tests through score comparisons…

The purpose of this study is to determine how students' academic achievement in English lessons improved when the layered flipped learning model is used in these lessons and what the students' views about the tasks chosen and performed within the scope of this model are. One of the qualitative research methods, the 'action research' method was…