Part of the monthly Saturday Review supplement, "Education in America, sponsored by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation.

The comprehension approach to second language education emphasizes acquisition of listening comprehension prior to and as a vehicle for acquisition of other language skills. The following articles on this approach are collected here: (1) "Nonlinear Learning and Language Teaching" (Winitz); (2) "Aital cal aprene las lengas…

This study sought to determine the extent of the Navy's problem with recruits who have deficiencies in the verbal English comprehension skills necessary to complete recruit training. English language comprehension skills, particularly verbal comprehension, of a cross-section of new recruits were assessed at three training centers--Orlando, Great…

To understand a text, a reader must engage in three important cognitive activities--recognition, comprehension, and memory. Based on this premise, two experiments were conducted with children to assess individual and developmental differences in speed of word recognition and how these differences related to performance on a variety of memory…

In a previous study, subjects that heard a monaurally presented two-clause sentence immediately followed by a probe word (identical word recognition) were faster at recognizing the probe as a sentence word with their left ears than with their right ears. This result suggested that the right ear was particularly efficient at transforming…

Two experiments on the processing of lexical ambiguities in spoken prose were conducted using college students as subjects. The studies focused on noun-noun ambiguities, e.g. "straw" and "organ." The experiments utilized a variable stimulus onset asynchrony priming paradigm in which an auditory stimulus is followed at a…

These tape lessons follow the sequence of the intermediate Nepali Reader. There are 12 lessons each containing various types of exercises designed to increase listening, speaking, and reading skills. Each lesson contains the following types of exercises: (1) listening comprehension; (2) question answering; (3) repetition; and (4) multiple choice…

Just as the perceptual act of seeing and the higher cerebral process involved in reading are not identical, "listening" at the signal level of auditory perception is different from the act of auditory symbol comprehension known as "auding." Definitions of auding and contrasts between this process and the act of listening have been offered by Don…

Criteria for operationalizing reading come from three considerations: the purposes for reading, the linguistic units interpreted as basic, and the cognitive processes assumed to underlie reading comprehension. One purpose of reading is objectification, in which the reader is an interpreter and verifier of an author's symbolic representation of…

This investigation compared time-compressed lectures with lectures taped at a normal word rate and examined the direct application of compressed lectures to the educational process. Participants in this study, 87 college students enrolled in Botany 100, were randomly assigned to four groups--one control group and three treatment groups. The…

This teacher's guide contains a list of general auditory problem areas where students have the following problems: (a) inability to find or identify source of sound; (b) difficulty in discriminating sounds of words and letters; (c) difficulty with reproducing pitch, rhythm, and melody; (d) difficulty in selecting important from unimportant sounds;…

A total of 47 6-year-old children listened to stories after which they either constructed pictorial representations of those stories from a set of backgrounds and cut-out figures and objects, or they spent equivalent time classifying geometric figures. The pictorial elaboration task inhibited recall of the stories. This contrasts with results…

This study examined the effects of overt illustration on first graders' learning from oral prose. In all experiments, children heard prose selections, after (or during) which they illustrated selection content with plasticized figure cutouts and background scenes. Control subjects copied or colored geometric forms during the illustration period.…

The art of listening is no longer neglected, as may be seen by the materials (recreational and educational), articles, and book chapters which have come forth in the last five years. However, in order to improve communication among people, listening should be taught and teachers should integrate listening skill development into classroom…

This study attempted to determine whether sufficiently strong relationships existed between listening comprehension level and intelligence (as measured by individual tests) for the former to be used as a predictor of the latter. Ten boys and 10 girls randomly selected from each of grades 1, 3, and 5 were given the individually-administered…