Many people influence us throughout our lives, and sometimes we are fortunate enough to have the opportunity to reflect upon the influence. Often, this is more challenging than it sounds, as some people become a part of our DNA, inextricably linked to who we are, what we believe, and how we work. Such is the case of the influence of Robert (Bob)…

Spontaneous beat gestures are an integral part of the paralinguistic context during face-to-face conversations. Here we investigated the time course of beat-speech integration in speech perception by measuring ERPs evoked by words pronounced with or without an accompanying beat gesture, while participants watched a spoken discourse. Words…

The perception of lexical tones is addressed through research on South Kyungsang Korean, spoken in the southeastern part of Korea. Based on an earlier production study (Chang, 2008a, 2008b), a categorization experiment was conducted to determine the perceptually salient aspects of the perceptual nature of a high tone and a rising tone. The…

The present study used I. Ajzen's (1991) Theory of Planned Behavior (TBP) to explore college students' beliefs about listening supportively to a grieving friend. Responses to open-ended questions suggested that students ("N" = 23) perceived both benefits and risks, connected with listening supportively, for the grieving friend and for…

The First Grade Baseline Evaluation is an optional tool that can be used at the beginning of the school year to help teachers get to know the reading and language skills of each student. The evaluation is composed of seven screenings. Teachers may use the entire evaluation or choose to use those individual screenings that they find most beneficial…

Individuals with severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) often have reading challenges. They maintain or reestablish basic decoding and word recognition skills following injury, but problems with reading comprehension often persist. Practitioners have the potential to accommodate struggling readers by changing the presentational mode of text in a…

This article presents the authors' response to the insightful comments provided by Charles Alderson and Fred Davidson regarding their article entitled "Q-matrix construction: Defining the link between constructs and test items in large-scale reading and listening comprehension assessments" (Sawaki, Kim, & Gentile, 2009). Many issues raised by both…

A national survey by Custodero & Johnson-Green (2003) examined how parents experienced music with their infants, and found that many reported playing and singing music frequently. More than half of the parents described playing recorded music for their children daily, and parents who had played an instrument and taken music lessons themselves…

A longitudinal study analyzed (a) which lower- and higher-level semantic components uniquely predicted listening text comprehension and (b) the nature of the relation (i.e., direct and indirect) between the predictors and listening text comprehension in preschoolers. One-hundred and fifty-two children participated in the present study (68 females;…

With the rapid development of the global tourism industry, designing ESP-based curricula is now more vitally needed than ever. To work towards this goal, analyzing learners' problems and needs has become merely unavoidable. Therefore, this study aimed at examining the needs, functions and problems of 46 tourist police serving in different…

Testlets are subsets of test items that are based on the same stimulus and are administered together. Tests that contain testlets are in widespread use in language testing, but they also share a fundamental problem: Items within a testlet are locally dependent with possibly adverse consequences for test score interpretation and use. Building on…

The purpose of the study, which was conducted as a survey using a descriptive method, was to explore school managers' interpersonal communication skills in Turkey. The data were collected from teachers and managers working in Kindergartens, Primary Schools, Anatolian High Schools, and Vocational and Technical High Schools in the province of…

This study analyzes Achieve3000, Lexia Core 5, and Imagine Learning software programs designed to increase student literacy levels in a six-week summer school program. The Brainology program was also used with 4th to 6th grade students to determine if there was an increase in growth mindset. Three elementary schools with the highest percentages of…

This study investigates the effects of audiobooks on listening comprehension skills of EFL Students, and their attitudes towards using audiobooks in a foreign language classroom. The participants are 66 first-year students of a state university in Turkey. The research follows a pre- post-test control group research design using quantitative and…

This article presents a case study which aims at analyzing the influence that the first language has on the learning of a foreign language. This research was conducted in an ESL classroom from a Language Center in England and was carried out with a Saudi Arabian student during a two-month period. In order to conduct this research, theoretical…