Describes a study which examines the relationship between context redundancy and keyword intelligibility in sentences having both high and low redundancy. Word pairs were placed in similar positions in two sets of sentences: sentence pairs that one might find in text, and adages together with sentences that might be spoken. (SED)

Symbolic play and literate behavior involve similar mental processes: the production and comprehension of decontextualized language and narrative competence. Methodological and theoretical issues in recent studies are reviewed. Observational results support the theory of similar mental processes, but experimental results question a causal…

Describes two special-purposes English programs for Egyptian economists. One consisted of conversation sessions and extensive writing, and the other focused on developing listening and reading. The group that concentrated on listening and reading had greater gains in writing ability than the group that concentrated on speaking and writing. (SED)

Summarizes and discusses Krashen's "input hypothesis" as presented in his "Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition." Suggests that the input hypothesis fails to account convincingly for arrested second language acquisition in an acquisition-rich environment and that it is not directly applicable to U.S. high…

Discusses an approach to teaching Russian which addresses the problem from the perspective of the reader or listener. Students are taught first to identify the nuclear construction of sentences--the subject and predicate--and then to isolate the remaining noun phrases and relate them with one of the two core elements. (SED)

Describes a voice-recognition device which can be used as a complement to computer-assisted language instruction, specifically for students in their first two years of German study. This technology provides the advantage of immediate feedback for the students, regarding their speaking and listening skills--something that has not been possible in…

Thirty academically achieving and 30 learning-disabled adolescents were examined on a battery of auditory language comprehension tests. Results indicated that 73 percent of the learning-disabled group scored lower than all of the control Ss on one or more of these tests. The importance of identifying auditory comprehension defects in the…

Varied exercises are offered for teachers to use in sharpening students' listening skills. (DG)

Tested, in two separate studies, the assumption that listening comprehension is dependent, in part, upon an individual's level of cognitive complexity. Found that high-complex individuals comprehend more listening material than do their cognitively simpler counterparts. Lends support to an information processing conceptualization of listening. (PD)

Discusses some of the caveats of computer-assisted teaching of foreign languages raised in David Wyatt's paper, "Computer-Assisted Teaching and Testing of Reading and Listening." These include the limited ability of the computer to display text. Questions if the benefits of computer-assisted instruction justify the time, energy, and…

Reports on a procedure devised to train students in efficient reading comprehension strategies by using a standard exercise which can be applied to any reading text. Explains the purpose of each question and students' reactions to it. Comments on text selection and suggests that much of the technique could apply to listening comprehension. (EKN)

Suggests ways to overcome the learner's difficulty in understanding spoken English, e.g., assimilation, elision, change of tempo and of style, and the reduction of stresses. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

The purpose of this study was to identify the effects of read alouds on eighteen second graders' vocabulary acquisition and comprehension when listening to stories with and without companion texts. Following each reading session, the students were required to complete a 100 word cloze comprehension test, as well as a brief vocabulary test based on…

Article examined the relative contributions of pause frequency and articulation rate to the listener's extraphonic perception of rate, the invariance of the cue hierarchy across modalities, and the reproducibility of the extraphonic scale with somewhat different procedures and stimulus ensembles. (Author)