The Natural Approach to teaching second language communication skills is described. The Natural Approach is based on the proposition that acquirers in natural situations go through three stages: comprehension, early speech, and speech emergence. Provision of comprehensible input allows beginning learners to teach themselves how to speak. Thus,…

The study involving 82 hearing and 78 hearing impaired undergraduates was undertaken to test the hypothesis that hearing impaired Ss would cluster prepositions into different sentence groups when operating from scrambled story presentations than would hearing Ss. It was also hypothesized that hearing impaired Ss would show different cluster…

Social class differences in ability to communicate conditional information were investigated using 132 white, fifth-grade children of both lower and middle socioeconomic status. Results indicate communication, but not comprehension, problems exist for lower SES students. Implications of these findings are discussed. (Author/SDH)

Discussed the game-like atmosphere teachers might want to create for fruitful listening experiences as well as describing illustrative games that can be used for such purposes. (Author/RK)

Preschool children were tested for their understanding of the use of definite and indefinite articles in 2 kinds of story-telling tasks. (ST)

A program and suggestions are outlined to bring about good listening habits in children. (JH)

This study focuses on meaning differentiation among different causative expressions. Semantic differences between lexical and periphrastic expressions are reviewed. A picture comprehension task was administered to 32 adults and 99 children between the ages of 32 and 70 months. The children were asked to select the picture that matched a sentence…

The LARC (Listening and Reading Comprehension) Program, an experiential based story grammar approach to listening and reading comprehension is described, and a pilot study of its effectiveness with communication handicapped children is reviewed. The LARC framework translates children's own recent experiences into sequenced story episodes which are…

The project described in this report was begun with the belief that elementary language instruction can be speeded up and made far more pleasant if initial emphasis is given to comprehension and if the requirement to use language productively, in speech or writing, is postponed until a fair comprehension ability has been achieved. It was also felt…

This study was designed to investigate whether the listening ability of second-grade students could be improved using compressed-speech training as compared to normal listening training. The subjects were 95 second-grade pupils in a low-to-middle class suburban community in central New Jersey. The plan was to expose an experimental group to…

In order to ascertain the effectiveness of a short instructional program involving four marking skills required in following directions, a study was conducted with six kindergarten classes (130 children) taught by three teachers. The experimental and control groups in each class were given the pretest and posttest on the same days; otherwise, the…

The practicality of using speeded speech as an educational medium was explored in an Immersion study, in a Criterion study, and in Retention studies. Tapes of novels were used for listening; compression was achieved by a device that removed small segments of the tape-recorded speech sounds and, then, abutted the remainder of the speech record…

To determine the effect of purpose, background information, and distractions on the listening act, 692 fourth graders in 24 classrooms were randomly assigned to eight treatment conditions before listening to a 12 minute taped dramatization. One half of the classes were told they would be tested on the taped material; the other half were given no…

In order to explore the effect of semantic organization on the comprehension of sentences, this research, based on the hypothesis that fully grammatical sentences would be processed more easily than anomalous sentences, depended on data provided by 20 paid college students serving in individual sessions. Each student listened to 30 tape-recorded…

To determine the effect of motivation on listening comprehension, this study investigated the effects of two levels of reward and two levels of punishment on immediate recall and reflective listening. The reward was three or 10 points added to the subject's semester grade in a speech class for performance above 85%, and the punishment was three or…