This book responds to the expansion of dual language immersion (DLI) programs into secondary contexts, examining the effectiveness of these programs and highlighting areas for improvement in the curriculum. Focusing on Mandarin Chinese DLI in Utah secondary schools, it presents the views of teachers, parents and students on the newly implemented…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine talker differences for subjectively rated speech clarity in clear versus conversational speech, to determine whether ratings differ for young adults with normal hearing (YNH listeners) and older adults with hearing impairment (OHI listeners), and to explore effects of certain talker characteristics…

Phonemic Awareness is the understanding that words are made up of individual sounds. These individual sounds are referred to as phonemes. Within the English language, there are about 44 sounds, and several of these are rather difficult for children to grasp. Mastery of phonemic awareness is a foundational skill for reading, yet is often skimmed…

Purpose: Normal-hearing and hard-of-hearing listeners suffer from reduced speech intelligibility in noisy and reverberant environments. Although daily listening environments are in constant motion, most researchers have only studied speech-in-noise perception for stationary masker locations. The aim of this study was to investigate the spatial…

Purpose: Listener-targeted perceptual training paradigms, which leverage the mechanism of perceptual learning, show strong promise for improving intelligibility in dysarthria, offsetting the communicative burden from the speaker onto the listener. Theoretical models of perceptual learning underscore the importance of acoustic regularity (i.e.,…

The authors conducted a phenomenological study of 10 practicum students' experiences of the integrative reflective model of group supervision. Six categories emerged: (a) intentional listening, (b) engaged in the process, (c) extension and application of the model, (d) personalization feedback, (e) mindful listening, and (f) dimensional feedback.…

The heightened importance of foreign languages (L2) in the post 9-11 world demands more L2 listening research as listening is considered the most critical skill for most American military linguists. Some larger studies show that lexical knowledge can positively affect L2 listening (Chang, 2007; Mehrpour & Rahimi, 2010; Staehr, 2009), yet…

This study aims to advance our understanding of the role of word knowledge in second language (L2) reading comprehension by exploring whether morphological awareness and vocabulary assessed one year ago contribute to decoding and listening comprehension which in turn contribute to reading comprehension in Chinese children learning English as an…

This study examined the differences among the typically developing, low-achieving, and young offender participants on indices of oral and silent reading, listening comprehension, the Raven and behavior scales, and parental status. A convenient sample of 81 males and females from the same geographical region in the Sultanate of Oman took part in…

Corpus-based studies have offered the domain definition inference for test developers. Yet, corpus-based studies on temporal fluency measures (e.g., speech rate) have been limited, especially in the context of academic lecture settings. This made it difficult for test developers to sample representative fluency features to create authentic…

The Global Englishes Language Teaching (GELT) approach plays an essential role in English as a lingua franca. Previous GELT studies only examined the influence of Global English exposure on learners' attitudes in the Inner, Outer, and Expanding Circles. This study added explicit instruction on phonological features in addition to a variety of…

The present research aims to bridge the gap between prospective multi/plurilingual education and overarching personality psychology by examining how language constructs and basic personality traits are interrelated in pre-service teachers who are fundamental to language education. The first part of the study identifies items within the…

We explored reading comprehension development in children on the spectrum from pre-school to the first (YOS1) and third year of schooling (YOS3). Children were first assessed on meaning-related skills in pre-school. Forty-one children completed follow-up assessments of reading comprehension, reading accuracy, and listening comprehension in YOS1.…

The principle of fairness in testing traditionally involves an assertion about the absence of bias, or that measurement should be impartial (i.e., not provide an unfair advantage or disadvantage), across groups of test takers. In more general-purposes language testing, a test taker's background knowledge is not typically considered relevant to the…

There is growing literature on computerized dynamic assessment (C-DA) wherein individual items are accompanied by mediating prompts, but its effectiveness at fine-grained levels across time has not been explored sufficiently. This study constructed a computerized listening dynamic assessment (CLDA) system, where mediation was informed by an…