Factors affecting student listening comprehension include those inherent - age, IQ, hearing ability, knowledge of the foreign language, memory - and those relating to material - content, complexity, length, use of visual clues. Suggestions are made for adapting text material to effective listening exercises. (CHK)

Presented are examples of auditory training procedures using toys, environmental sounds and speech with visually impaired, multiply handicapped children. (CL)

When studying the question, Do primary students learn better through listening or reading?, the readability of the material used should be considered. (JH)

A study explored the effects of an expanded Language Experience Approach (LEA) on listening comprehension skills of kindergarteners. During a 2-year period, two exerpiments were conducted with different groups of kindergarteners. The second experiment replicated the first experiment and was conducted to determine if an expanded LEA would produce…

The Listening Summary Translation Exam (LSTE)-Spanish is designed to assess the ability to comprehend and summarize in written English recorded conversations spoken in Spanish. Language and topics of the exam are representative of conversations the Federal Bureau of Investigation routinely monitors. This test consists of two subtests, one…

Although listening comprehension has been identified as the first and most important foreign language skill, research has shown that little class time is devoted to developing more than very basic listening skills. Early practice in listening in a foreign language helps to develop both language skills and confidence in communicating in the target…

A study of the effects of peer-pairing and integrative motivation on both formal language performance and actual language behavior with Korean immigrant children is presented. The formal language learning was measured by tests of oral production and listening comprehension, and actual language behavior was measured by observations in a natural…

A study investigating whether and how non-native speakers of English (NNS) make efforts to repair communication breakdowns with other NNS used data gathered from 59 verbal interactions by 26 students. The students were grouped by proficiency level (low, medium, and high) before the analysis of the interactions took place. Each instance of…

Methods to contextualize tests in the four skill areas of listening, reading, writing, and speech are described. The roles of grammatical and lexical cues, recording semantic details, cloze adaptation, comprehensive questions, logical continuation items, global classification, and sociolinguistic factors are examined in relation to test formats.…

To investigate young children's understanding of metaphorical language, 90 chidren from preschool to third grade were read stories ending with metaphorical sentences of varying degrees of difficulty--sentences representing more or less predictable story outcomes and differing in the complexity and explicitness of their figures of speech. After…

Two experiments were conducted (1) to identify the component processes of language comprehension that draw upon cognitive capacity for their execution, and (2) to determine differences in patterns of resource allocation during integrative processing for good and poor readers. In the first experiment, nine good and nine poor college-age readers…

The one-parameter psychometric model known as the Rasch model is described and examined. The basic principles underlying the model and the concepts of unidimensionality, local stochastic independence, and additivity are explained in non-mathematical terms. The requirements of measurement procedures, the measurement of latent traits, the control on…

Two studies examined children's perceptual biases in extracting or identifying words from the stream of speech. In one study, evidence for the salience of stressed and final syllables was found. Young children less frequently omitted those syllables from their productions and produced unstressed and nonfinal syllables less accurately. A second…

Views on the role of speech in the early stages of English as second language (ESL) acquisition are discussed in relation to experiences with elementary school children. In examining the roles of speech and grammar in the early stages of ESL acquisition in an English speaking elementary school environment, six types of expressive language were…

Aspects of second language learning and instruction are explored in order to develop a rationale for a comprehension-based approach to language instruction. Eight characteristic pedagogical assumptions are critically examined, including assumptions regarding the role of grammar, age differences in learning ability, the priority given to each of…