Teaching listening and speaking in English in China has been given top priority on the post-secondary level. This has lead to the question of how learners develop communicative language ability (CLA) effectively in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) environments. The authors demonstrate a self-developed language skill learning system with…

Open source lectures not only provide knowledge-seekers with convenient ways to obtain knowledge and information, they also serve as potential language learning resources that provide extensive language input and repeated exposure to vocabulary within specific topics or disciplines. This current study aims to examine the relationship between…

"Emergent literacy" is defined as the developmental process beginning at birth in which children acquire the foundation for reading and writing, including language, listening comprehension, concepts of print, alphabetic knowledge, and phonological awareness. The environment within which emergent literacy skills develop is also an important…

This study reports on a pilot implementation of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) at a Spanish university. In order to find out how both lecturers and students perceived their experience, several interviews and meetings took place with lecturers, and an open-ended questionnaire was passed to students. The meetings and interviews with…

This article discusses why early and sustained vocabulary development is important for listening and reading comprehension development and presents findings from 8 studies implemented with children of mostly low socioeconomic status in settings from day care to first grade. Program interventions were based on learning new vocabulary developed out…

This study examines strategies (inferencing and ignoring) and knowledge sources (semantics, morphology, paralinguistics, etc.) that second language learners of English use to process unfamiliar words in listening comprehension and whether the use of strategies or knowledge sources relates to successful text comprehension or word comprehension.…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop a survey for co-creating leadership dispositional values and contexts by examining the self-perceptions of school leaders, teachers, and staff on the practice of co-creating leadership behaviors and conditions that facilitate the practice. Design/methodology/approach: Based on qualitative data and a…

The "Mozart effect" occurs when performance on spatial cognitive tasks improves following exposure to Mozart. It is hypothesized that the Mozart effect arises because listening to complex music activates similar regions of the right cerebral hemisphere as are involved in spatial cognition. A counter-intuitive prediction of this hypothesis (and one…

A sample of 1,273 4-year-old children were followed for 3 years. The children participated in 1 of 2 comprehension training programs, or in a phonological awareness training program. The comprehension programs explored the possibility of improving young children's oral comprehension in an educational setting. The first focused on the component…

Three elementary teachers share how they engaged in active listening with the families of children in their classrooms by using home-school journals. Their use spans pre-Kindergarten to fifth grade, and the techniques and responses by each teacher vary based on need and intended purpose. The authors share explanations of process, findings, and…

This study examined the extent to which glossaries may affect the percentage of known words (coverage) in television programs. The transcripts of 51 episodes of 2 television programs ("House" and "Grey's Anatomy") were analyzed using Range (Heatley, Nation, & Coxhead, 2002) to create glossaries consisting of the low-frequency (less frequent than…

The website "Active Listening" was developed within a larger project--"Interactive Web-based training in the subtleties of communication and active listening skill development." The Active Listening site aims to provide beginning counseling psychology students with didactic and experimental learning activities and interactive tests so that…

Paired Reading is a peer tutoring programme in secondary schools which trains teachers to support and encourage the regular tutoring of Year 7 pupils (aged 11-12 years) by Year 9 pupils (aged 13-14 years). The Paired Reading programme aims to improve pupils' general literacy in addition to speaking and listening skills. This is achieved by pupils…

This longitudinal study investigated growth in reading-related skills between Grade 1 and 4 for language minority (LM) learners and their native English-speaking classmates from similarly low socioeconomic backgrounds (N = 166). Growth trajectories were compared by language background and by Grade 4 reading difficulties, with the goal of informing…

Both reading and language experiences contribute to vocabulary development, but questions remain as to what effect each has and when. This article investigates the effects that reading, telling and sharing a story have on vocabulary acquisition. Children (N = 37) were told nine stories in a randomized, single-blind and counterbalanced 2 × 3 mixed…