Literacy instruction for students with significant intellectual disabilities traditionally emphasizes isolated skills instruction focusing on sight words and basic vocabulary. Recent research suggests these students benefit from high-quality instruction that includes comprehension and storybook reading. This study examined the effect of a…

The study explains the process of learners' listening comprehension within Halliday's information theory in functional grammar, including the skills of identifying focuses while listening in college English teaching. Identifying information focuses in listening is proved to improve the students' communicative listening ability by the means of a…

Spoken word recognition is achieved via competition between activated lexical candidates that match the incoming speech input. The competition is modulated by prelexical cues that are important for segmenting the auditory speech stream into linguistic units. One such prelexical cue that listeners rely on in spoken word recognition is phonotactics.…

This study investigated the effects of training learners of English as a foreign language with different rates of speech and controls over speech rate. Subjects were put into one of four treatment groups: (A) trained on listening comprehension materials recorded at a fast speed, (B) trained on slow recordings, (C) given some choice about the…

This article reports on a study that was primarily aimed at investigating the effects of simultaneous use of careful online planning and task repetition on accuracy, complexity, and fluency in the oral production of learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). The effects of four planning and task repetition conditions (i.e. careful online…

Although the presence or absence of a pitch accent clearly can play an important role in signaling the discourse and information structure of an utterance, whether the form of an accent determines the type of information it conveys is more controversial. We used an eye-tracking paradigm to investigate whether H*, which has been argued to signal…

The objective of this study is to investigate the effect of metacognitive listening strategy training on the listening performance of a group of beginner preparatory school students at a university in Turkey. Two beginner groups, a control group (n: 20) and an experimental group (n: 20), were chosen as the participants of the study. The…

According to the Simple View of Reading (SVR), reading comprehension is the product of word decoding ability and linguistic comprehension (R = D x C). However, there is also evidence showing that an additive model (R = D + C) explains just as much or even more of the variance in reading comprehension than the product model. To further evaluate…

This study investigated the effects of a metacognitive, process-based approach to teaching second language (L2) listening over a semester. Participants (N = 106) came from six intact sections of French as a second language (FSL) courses. The experimental group (n = 59) listened to texts using a methodology that led learners through the…

Contemporary neural models of auditory language comprehension proposed that the two hemispheres are differently specialized in the processing of segmental and suprasegmental features of language. While segmental processing of syntactic and lexical semantic information is predominantly assigned to the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere is…

We examined the Simple View of reading from a behavioral genetic perspective. Two aspects of word decoding (phonological decoding and word recognition), two aspects of oral language skill (listening comprehension and vocabulary), and reading comprehension were assessed in a twin sample at age 9. Using latent factor models, we found that overlap…

One common way of assessing learners' proficiency in second language (L2) listening comprehension is by comprehension-restitution (C-R), whereby learners write down what they have heard. The various forms of C-R differ according to characteristics of the input (e.g., length, speech rate) and of the output (e.g., amount of detail requested). The…

Purpose: Acquisition of prosodic control appears to evolve across development with younger children relying on durational cues and older children utilizing a broader spectrum of cues including fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration. This study aimed to determine whether unfamiliar listeners could identify prosodic contrasts produced by 4-,…

Three studies using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm examined onset of productive comprehension of tense/aspect morphology in English. When can toddlers understand these forms with novel verbs and novel events? The first study used familiar verbs and showed that 26-36-month olds correctly matched a past/perfective form ("-ed" or…

Background: Reading component models such as the Simple View of Reading (SVR; Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990) provide a concise framework for describing the processes and skills involved when readers comprehend texts. According to the Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading (Rose, 2006) strong evidence for the SVR…