Examines first- and third-grade children and college adults' ability to make excuse inferences about a speaker's use of an utterance and to modify those inferences appropriately upon receiving later information. Possible reasons for children's inflexibility were examined by varying the difficulty of relating the excuse interpretation and…

Examines the role of suprasegmental phonology in speech processing and its implications for reading instruction; also reviews evidence for the hypothesis that prosodic features cue the boundaries of perceptually functional units in spoken sentences, thus assisting the listener in the segmentation of verbal information. (FL)

Reports a study in which Late Stage 1 Down's syndrome children's responses were examined for their pragmatic and semantic relationships to four types of requests used by mothers. Findings indicate the responses used by retarded children and normal children are the same at this linguistic stage. (SED)

Reading, self-esteem, auding, and verbal language levels were measured for 132 youths and adults entering a tutorial program. Results showed that the subjects had low levels of auding, verbal language, and reading, but self-esteem was not significantly related to the other variables. Auding and verbal language skills were shown to be important to…

This study investigated the English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) listening needs of college students in Taiwan, examining the ESL conversational and academic listening abilities required by college students and differences in listening needs between effective and ineffective ESL listeners. Study participants were 296 Taiwanese college freshmen. The…

Using the Watson-Barker Listening Test Form A and Form B as pretest and posttest at the freshman level, this research attempted to determine whether the two forms of the test and the differences between pretest and posttest would be significant predictors of students' final grade point average (GPA). Each form of the test was taken by 190 students…

This brief paper focuses on where the Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) field has been and where it is going regarding the studying and teaching of listening comprehension. It reviews in some detail a few of the leading texts in the field: "Building Strategies" by Abbs and Freebairn (1979); "English Firsthand: Gold…

This study investigated whether participation in a computer lab would improve high school students' performance on Spanish vocabulary, grammar, and listening comprehension. Students participated in classroom and computer lab activities. Analysis of student data (including student surveys) throughout five units indicated that the computer lab was a…

This report describes a program for improving active and critical listening skills for elementary age students. The targeted population consists of middle school children located near a large midwestern city. The problems of poor listening skills are documented through data revealing the need for attending interventions that have been put in…

Most computerized tests are simple applications that make limited use of the technology inherent in computer-delivered examinations. One potentially valuable feature of computer-administered examinations is the ability to play audio files, a function that makes it possible to incorporate sound into computer-based tests. Audio tests allow the…

Paper presented to the staff of the English Language Branch--Defense Language Institute, Lockland Air Force Base, Lockland, Texas, 1973. (HW)

Discusses a dual track'' approach to language learning providing emphases on reading and on multiple linguistic skills. (DD)

Abridged version of the original Swedish article. (DD)