Despite the current enthusiasm for teaching critical thinking and the need acknowledged by many educators to improve students' speaking and listening skills, very few schools have actually put critical listening skills into their curricula. One reason listening skills have been so slow in becoming a part of the formal instruction program at most…

A study compared the relative values of listen-respond and listen-respond-compare language laboratory methods. College-level language students were examined and it was determined that the listen-respond method caused greater comprehension gain. Student recording was found ineffective for first-year students, and may be a definite hindrance. (CHK)

Good listening is a process that requires such elements as direct training, patience, practice, and understanding. (JH)

Listening skills are enormously important both in and of themselves and as correlates with reading comprehension. Storytelling is a very productive approach for encouraging listening skills. Perhaps the focal point relative to promoting listening competencies rests with generating appropriate attitudes among listeners. Directions for listening to…

A study examined skills related to an individual's satisfaction with a partner's listening ability. Forty-nine undergraduates in a listening skills class were asked to increase the use of effective listening behaviors with three to five individuals with whom they had a relationship--this resulted in 194 participants in the study. Two…

Noting the differences in processing information by reading and by listening, two studies examined subjects' ability to detect errors in written and oral prose. In both experiments, college students were presented with four expository passages drawn from different written sources. All passages were approximately 300 words and 5 paragraphs long,…

The emergence of a subfield of linguistics, linguistic pragmatics, whose goal is to discover the principles by which a hearer or reader understands a text or can construct a model based on the text, given the sentence-level competence to parse the text's sentences and assign logical forms to them, is discussed in the context of a court case in…

A study investigated the effect of pausing, a component of speech speed, on the listening comprehension of second language learners. Groups of subjects at two ability levels listened to taped versions of two brief lectures recorded with four different combinations of speed and pausing conditions. Comprehension was measured by means of cloze tests…

The kinds of testing of listening skills that could be introduced for Foreign Languages in Elementary Schools (FLES) in the early stages of instruction (e.g., in the third grade at the end of 10-20 clock hours of instruction) are discussed. It is suggested that listening is rarely tested in isolation, but normally is mixed with speaking or…

A modular-type course in French was developed at the "Centre d'anglais et de francais" at McGill University (Montreal) to meet the needs of incoming students who were lacking skills in listening and oral expression. The course is composed of eight modules a semester, each module corresponding to 15 to 20 hours work on the student's part. The…

The study examined the ways in which different categories of discourse marker affect how well foreign college students understand university lectures, and specifically, the effects of macro markers (those indicating overall organization) and micro markers (functioning as fillers, indicating links between sentences). Four versions of an American…

Abridged version of Tolstoy's story, "A Shark," is used for reading and listening comprehension tests. The tests stress correct pronunciation, accent, and memorization of phrases. (HK)

This study proposed to determine the relative value of two specific techniques of instruction in the social studies, reading and listening, when the factors of varying levels of intelligence and reading ability, and sex were considered. (Author)

Two experiments examine the extent to which the representation of a sentence depends upon the overall nature of a subject's task, in this case, memorization of a sentence and providing a continuation for a sentence. (AM)

This report describes part of a longer study on sentence comprehension. The long range goal is to identify distinct levels of processing in terms of the types of linguistic and extralinguistic information each level uses. The focus of this part of the study is sentences with filler-gap relations, such as, "This is the girl the teacher wanted to…