Notes the importance of listening in the learning process. Describes cause for concern for deteriorating listening skills among students and teachers, and the need for promoting active listening skills in the classroom and eventually integrating listening across the curriculum. Gives basic classroom principles, suggestions for successful…

Two talkers' productions of the same phoneme may be quite different acoustically, whereas their productions of different speech sounds may be virtually identical. Despite this lack of invariance in the relationship between the speech signal and linguistic categories, listeners experience phonetic constancy across a wide range of talkers, speaking…

Even though the importance of effective listening skills is well recognized and many K-12 language arts standards include listening skills, the amount of time devoted to the teaching of listening and the quality of instructional resources that will enable the effectiveness of teaching listening as a two-way communication process are in question.…

We propose a bridge between cognitive and sociocultural approaches that is anchored on the sociocultural side by distributed cognition and participation, and on the cognitive side by information structures. We interpret information structures as the contents of distributed knowing and interaction in activity systems. Conceptual understanding is…

How to improve students' ability of speaking English? That is the key point we are concerned about. This paper discusses the possibility and necessity of improving students' ability by combining the four skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing.

Action research places a powerful tool for school improvement in the hands of teachers. By highlighting the outcomes that are possible and presenting clear steps in the research process, this book is one to encourage anyone who is seeking to implement evidence-based school improvement. Eileen Piggot-Irvine uses her Problem Resolving Action…

Non-native speakers of English often experience problems in pronunciation as they are learning English, many such problems persisting even when the speaker has achieved a high degree of fluency. Research has shown that for a non-native speaker to sound most natural and intelligible in his or her second language, the speaker must acquire proper…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to assess the time course of spoken word recognition in 2-year-old children who use cochlear implants (CIs) in quiet and in the presence of speech competitors. Method: Children who use CIs and age-matched peers with normal acoustic hearing listened to familiar auditory labels, in quiet or in the presence of…

Many teachers and researchers believe learning preferences or learning styles can be used advantageously to enhance language study and motivate learners. Following an overview of Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences (MI) and research on multimedia-based approaches in foreign language instruction, this paper first describes a study comparing…

This article discusses several strategies for building varied bases of influence within a college setting. These strategies include, providing opportunities for success, advocating and implementing good ideas, interacting with individuals on both the personal and non-personal levels, establishing support among marginal individuals, learning to…

The present study investigated the functioning of three psychometric models for cognitive diagnosis--the general diagnostic model, the fusion model, and latent class analysis--when applied to large-scale English as a second language listening and reading comprehension assessments. Data used in this study were scored item responses and incidence…

The most challenging youth have learned to be experts at outwitting helping professionals. Often with hurt kids, if interactions move beyond the stuff plainly spoken and capture the emotional nuance, the student will respond with an amplification of his emotional tone. Hurt, abandonment and rejection make this student adult wary and impact his…

The purpose of this study was to examine the simple view of reading (SVR) and contributions of verbal proficiency and reading fluency to reading comprehension for fourth-, seventh- and ninth-grade readers (N = 271). The SVR explained a significant proportion of variance in reading comprehension for all grades with decreasing explained variance in…

A spoken language eye-tracking methodology was used to evaluate the effects of sentence context and proficiency on parallel language activation during spoken language comprehension. Nonnative speakers with varying proficiency levels viewed visual displays while listening to French sentences (e.g., "Marie va decrire la poule" [Marie will…