This article reports on a study to identify listening, and aural comprehension difficulties experienced by students of English, specifically RELC (Regional English Language Centre in Singapore) course members. The most critical errors are discussed and conclusions about foreign language learning are drawn. (CLK)

The results of recent studies are presented which show that traditional auditory discrimination tests for children which require the examinee to distinguish one speech sound from another are ill-conceived and consequently of little practical value. Linguistic variables requiring attention in designing useful speech sound discrimination instruments…

In order to investigate the possible consequences of dialectical differences in the classroom setting relative to the low income black and white first grade child and the prospective white middle-class teacher, 25 black and 25 white university listeners yielded speech recognition scores for 48 black and 48 white five-year-old urban school-children…

Neither the nature of orientation instructions nor monetary incentives have significant effects on listening achievement, according to results of one experiment. The study tested six groups of subjects on the contents of one speech heard by all. The orientation variable of the speech had three conditions: interesting, neutral, and boring subjects…

In standard listening-speaking situations, non-verbal clues are normally used. These clues complement speech; they give added information about the speaker; and they probably have different meanings in different cultures. Therefore two types of listening situations should be tested: hearing only, and hearing and seeing. (AMH)

Two studies analyze and evaluate the use of the chunk," a small group of meaningfully related words within a sentence, as a test item in reading and listening tests. (PR)

It is widely believed that listeners understand some dialects more easily than others, although there is very little research that has rigorously measured the effects. This study investigated whether listeners experience more difficulty with regional, ethnic, and international dialects of English than with Standard American English. The results…

In a crossmodal priming experiment, visual targets (e.g. "RENARD," "fox") were auditorily primed by either an intact [l[schwa][R][schwa]na[R]] "the fox" or reduced form [l[schwa][R]na[R]] "the fox" of the word. When schwa deletion gave rise to an initial cluster that respected the phonotactic constraints of French (e.g. [lapluz] "the lawn" in…

This paper explores how the interaction between cognitive style, gender, and type of task predicts task outcome, particularly when presentation speed is varied. A sample of 91 11-year-old pupils completed the Cognitive Style Analysis. Pupils were assigned to one of two groups balanced for gender and cognitive style. Group 1 listened to a recording…

Two same/different discrimination tasks were performed by amateur-musician subjects in this functional magnetic resonance imaging study: Melody Discrimination and Harmony Discrimination. Both tasks led to activations not only in classic working memory areas--such as the cingulate gyrus and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex--but in a series of…

Listening is the most important of the four language skills and is used most often in everyday communication. Teachers need innovative ways to address the particular listening problems emerging in their own contexts. "Teaching Listening: Voices From the Field" shares successful practices employed by teachers at different levels of education around…

This paper reports on a project which investigates the impact of systemic environmental education (EE) programs on student achievement on EE-based integrated tests and standardized tests in math, language arts, and listening. Systemic environmental education programs are defined by curriculum designed to align and integrate subjects around real…

In cognitive diagnosis a Q-matrix (Tatsuoka, 1983, 1990), which is an incidence matrix that defines the relationships between test items and constructs of interest, has great impact on the nature of performance feedback that can be provided to score users. The purpose of the present study was to identify meaningful skill coding categories that…

The present study evaluates the relative effectiveness of three types of input-based approaches for teaching English polite request forms to sixty Japanese learners of English: (a) structured input tasks with explicit information; (b) problem-solving tasks; and (c) structured input tasks without explicit information. Treatment group performance…

A variety of informal language development assessment tools is presented for use with children with developmental disabilities. This book is written as a manual for clinicians and researchers for evaluating children who cannot meet the cognitive, perceptual, or motor requirements of standardized tests and to help evaluate aspects of language not…