Three short articles highlight tips for teaching in the English-as-a-Second-Language classroom, including cooperative learning strategies, a listening comprehension activity, and ideas on why detail is essential for clarity in writing. (CK)

Finds that assisted practice significantly improved the text reading rates and reading comprehension scores of the experimental groups compared to the control group, although some gains did not reach statistical significance. Finds that listening while reading resulted in twice the amount of reading as the other method and led to higher scores on…

Age-related differences in language and other neuropsychological variables in 60 noninstitutionalized adults with Down syndrome were examined. Results indicated that there were significant relations between advanced age and the ability to comprehend spoken language and between advanced age and independence in activities of daily living skills.…

This study, involving 40 normal-hearing 6 year olds, substantiates the form equivalence of the Selective Auditory Attention Test. Analysis shows equal mean difficulty and significant correlations between lists in quiet and between lists presented with competing speech. (Author/JDD)

Of three methods (free recall, verbally prompted recall, and visually prompted recall) for eliciting understanding of a folk tale by 35 adolescents with intellectual disability, none proved significantly better in eliciting story understanding. All measures correlated with short-term memory, suggesting that subjects' difficulty encoding stories…

A discussion of the use of video as instructional material in the second-language classroom looks at the relationship between the visual and the verbal and offers a number of exercises using each, together and separately. (MSE)

It is argued that listening comprehension must be developed in second-language learners as actively as oral expression has been for many years. Exercises specifically for beginning language learners are described. They include physical response to commands, discovery and location activities, and group recitation or storytelling. (MSE)

An auditory comprehension task was used to determine the ways in which first and fifth graders and adults use topic continuity and contrastive emphasis in the assignment of referents for pronouns in sentences. The finding of significant differences in performance for emphasized and unemphasized pronouns suggests that subjects use constrastive…

Studies on comprehensible input generally emphasize how input is made comprehensible to the nonnative speaker by examining native speaker speech or teacher talk in the classroom. This paper uses Hong Kong secondary school data to show that only when modification devices involve learner participation do they serve as indicators of comprehensible…

A two-year-old child and an eight-year-old bonobo exposed to spoken English and lexigrams from infancy were asked to respond to novel sentences. Both subjects comprehended novel requests and simple syntactic devices. The bonobo decoded the syntactic device of word recursion more accurately than the child; the child performed better than the bonobo…

Dictation in language testing is discussed: its definition, types, history, procedures, possible applications, and some issues concerning dictation as a device for testing English as a Foreign Language. A sample passage for testing student proficiency is included. (22 references) (LB)

Ways that dictation helps students learn English as a Foreign Language are discussed. Varieties of dictation are included along with one teacher's experience using it in a Chinese university. (one reference) (LB)

Reports on a two-phase study of second-language learner use of listener feedback, particularly their use of clarification questions in native speaker-nonnative speaker discourse. (29 references) (JL)

Describes what constituted literary understanding for one classroom interpretive community of first and second graders by analyzing their oral responses as picture storybooks were read aloud to them. Suggests that the impressive literary critical abilities of children as young as first and second grade are appropriately understood through a wide…

Examines the effect of the use of French as a second language on the performance of subjects in receptive skills (listening and reading comprehension) and productive skills (speaking and writing). Results establish a link between the use of the language after learning has occurred and the difference between pre- and post-test measures. (Author/VWL)