Title III of Public Law 107-110 (No Child Left Behind; NCLB) provided for creation of assessments of English language learners (ELLs) and established, through the Enhanced Assessment Grant program, a platform from which four consortia of states developed ELL tests aligned to rigorous statewide content standards. Those four tests (ACCESS for ELLs,…

An instructor developed audio-stimulus activities for use with students and colleagues after attending conferences and short courses where similar activities were conducted. After listening to a tape-recorded "typical scenario" (different for each audience), participants answer a few questions about the scenario. Small groups of students…

Boundaries in running speech are not all equally obvious acoustically. The research reported here is concerned with identifying the acoustic characteristics that trigger the listener's response to boundary signals. The eventual goal is to establish the relevance of the boundary to the syntactic and semantic structure of the message. (Author/TL)

A language comprehension test using electronically distorted sentences was developed at Bar Ilan University in Israel as an attempt to measure communicative competence. Reliability coefficients, student reactions, and a sample dialogue are provided. (MSE)

In a fifty-minute period, a class of speech students can be given an object lesson in listening skills. Materials needed are an article that can be read aloud in ten minutes, enough copies for class distribution, and a carefully composed list of ten to twelve questions. When the students arrive for the first class, the teacher reads the article…

Because there is little research evidence about the listening performance of blind children, a study was designed (in Australia) to provide information on their listening habits as compared with those of sighted children. Forty-four students (22 of them blind) listened in a classroom to tape-recorded material from two tests, Forms X and Y of the…

This study constructed and evaluated a program of listening skill activities for first grade children who had not yet developed skill in reading. The skills included were: (1) following directions, (2) listening for the main idea, and (3) listening for details. Three groups were tested: an experimental group taught by teachers; an experimental…

Describes a research project on listening ability developed at Birmingham University, England. (RN)

It was concluded that neither the sex of the listener nor the interaction of sex of listeners and sex of speakers were of much consequence in determining the listening scores of the subjects of this experiment. (Author)

Presents an overview of "constructivist" models of speech perception and information processing and reviews a variety of aural comprehension evaluation techniques which reflect those models. (PMJ)

The results of a study are presented in which 40 preschool children were given 5 tasks including a test of story comprehension (listening and responding to questions) and a test of pragmatic awareness divided into 4 parts (listening to a story, retelling it, judging what was strange in it, and explaining the consequences of the "strange" event).…

Comparison of the results of performance by 36 7th graders on 3 measures of listening comprehension--the Sentence Verification Technique (SVT), a subtest of the Test of Adolescent Language, and the Premise/Inference Stories-- supports the potential of the SVT as a listening comprehension test. (SLD)

Explores the relationship between group interaction and interlanguage development, specifically listening comprehension and the production of target grammar forms. Two groups of first-semester Spanish students at an American University took notes on a mini-lecture, then completed a text reconstruction and listening comprehension test. Results…

The purpose of this paper was to discuss the importance of listening and to examine whether or not transcribing utterances in English using the Korean alphabet improved the accuracy in English sentences produced by a group of Korean college students. A total population of 120 students was divided into two groups, control and experiment. The…

First-language (L1) and 2nd-language (L2) oral language skills and L2 word reading were used as predictors to test the simple view of reading as a model of 2nd-language reading comprehension. The simple view of reading states that reading comprehension is related to decoding and oral language comprehension skills. One hundred thirty-one…