Listening remains generally unappreciated while being the communicative skill most used and essential to the human condition. There is no name for the condition of being unable to listen, but the term "illistenacy" could be used. An individual who can hear but cannot consciously attend, understand, and respond to non-written messages in…

This study examined the effects of enthusiastic teaching on the listening comprehension skills of kindergarten children. Subjects were 26 kindergartners who were evenly divided into experimental and control groups. Twelve pieces of literature were read to each group 3 days a week for 4 weeks. Teachers read to the experimental group in a highly…

This student workbook is a component of "Beginning Pashto," a set of materials (including a textbook, teacher's manual, tapescripts, and a glossary) that teaches the Pashto language. The workbook provides background information on Pashtun culture, discusses grammar, and includes information on individual vocabulary items. The workbook unit…

Impromptu speech is characterized by the simultaneous processes of ideation (the elaboration and structuring of reasoning by the speaker as he improvises) and expression in the speaker. Other elements accompany this characteristic: division of speech flow into short segments, acoustic relief in the form of word stress following a pause, and both…

The development of interactive video materials for developing listening comprehension in beginning learners of Hebrew as a second language is described. Initially, videotapes presenting stories in the form of interviews set in Israel were designed and produced according to current instructional design theory. These were viewed by the prospective…

Written for researchers and graduate students, this book--a collection of essays by cognitive scientists, socio- and psycholinguists, and English, reading, and language arts educators--explores theoretical and research questions associated with the relationships among oral and written language, listening and reading, and speaking and writing. The…

A study investigated whether instruction focusing on text structure would affect Japanese college students' listening comprehension. Subjects of the study were 29 students of a women's junior college and 38 students of a national university. Three passages were selected for their comprehensibility of content, short length, and readability. Each…

Four tests were chosen for a study that investigated the hypothesis that individual differences in aural comprehension might anticipate individual differences in general information. A composite of eight subtest scores from the Test of General Information (TGI) was used as a measure of students' general knowledge. The Listening section of the…

An experiment combining listening comprehension training and error analysis was conducted with students at the English Language Institute, Queens College, the City University of New York. The purpose of the study was to investigate how to take learners who were primarily dependent on perceptive skills for comprehension and widen their…

The Ekwall Reading Inventory is a set of reading passages ranging in difficulty from preprimer through ninth-grade level and contains instruments for assessing students' knowledge of letters, phonics, basic sight words, vowel rules and syllable principles, and contractions. The reading passages are designed to measure students' oral and silent…

A fundamental assumption in some recently developed language teaching methodologies is that there should be a silent period at the beginning of second language instruction during which students do not speak the target language but develop and demonstrate comprehension in other ways. A number of studies and experiments have attempted to illustrate…

The use of student lectures as an integrative language learning approach for university level English as second language students is described. Student lectures pair decoding skills with encoding skills through five steps: selecting an article of interest, reading the article and taking notes on it, using the notes to prepare an oral report,…

In the first two parts of an eight-part series of radio broadcasts from the People's Republic of China, transcripts of the broadcasts are presented in Chinese along with glossaries of vocabulary words and questions for each program. These transcripts are intended to be used with cassette tapes of the radio program selections. The series was…

In the third and fourth parts of an eight-part series of radio broadcasts from the People's Republic of China, transcripts of the broadcasts are presented in Chinese along with glossaries of vocabulary words and questions for each program. These transcripts are intended to be used with cassette tapes of the radio program selections. The series was…

In the fifth and sixth parts of an eight-part series of radio broadcasts from the People's Republic of China, transcripts of the broadcasts are presented in Chinese along with glossaries of vocabulary words and questions for each program. These transcripts are intended to be used with cassette tapes of the radio program selections. The series was…