When children begin formal schooling, their fundamental communication skills, speaking and listening, are well developed but limited in scope and range; it becomes the teacher's task to assist the children in achieving communicative competence. A developmental project called "Developing Communicative Competence in Children" identifies four…

This paper attempts to enact Rivers' (1971 and 1972) urgings to base ESL listening instruction on both psychological and linguistic findings and contends that advanced ESL students' listening needs call for improvement in processing spoken English discourse. Psychological data on memory span is cited to demonstrate that advanced ESL students…

The experimental test measures the ability of a subject to reconstruct obscured words by means of sentence analysis, carried out not as a separate academic task, but in the normal procedure of understanding what the sentence says. It is a task built on the assumption that the ability to handle reduced redundancy is a valid measure of linguistic…

The purpose of this study was to discover the effect of the introduction of nonstandard English dialect and lexicon in the classroom and to test the hypotheses that students exposed to oral material in dialect and lexicon would comprehend more, would have greater verbal recall, and would be more flexible and fluent in assigning titles to oral…

The major purposes of this study were (1) to determine if a listening comprehension test was as valid as a reading readiness test, a visual motor test, a group intelligence test, or an individual intelligence test in measuring the reading readiness of first grade pupils; and (2) to determine if a combination of two or more of these tests would…

This article suggests criteria for evaluating listening comprehension tests. The weaknesses of typical test items are discussed and suggestions for new types of items are given. (CFM)

Explores ways in which advanced conversation classrooms may provide the aural and written comprehensible input necessary for fostering the students' continued acquisition of the target language through examination of research and literature on: prelistening, decoding, intensive listening, comprehension, and skill application. (CB)

Reviews a secondary school version of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) that focuses on two of the primary language skills: listening and reading. Subtest includes a variety of tasks measuring semantic, syntactic, and higher-level reading comprehension abilities. (NKA)

Discusses Michael Canale's paper, "Considerations in the Testing of Reading and Listening Proficiency," focusing on the third section, "Suggestions for improvements in receptive language testing." Considers such areas as: (1) level descriptions for academic use, (2) item and item types, and (3) validation. (SED)

Describes an exploratory study to determine the usefulness of speech compression units. The compression rates (normal, 80 percent and 60 percent) are described as well as percentages of usage of each one, analysis of a student questionnaire, and indications on the need of further investigation. (AMH)

Reports on a study of high school students on the relationship between the types of listening comprehension strategies used, the frequency of their use, and the differences in reported use across four variables: level of language proficiency, gender, listening ability, and learning style. (Author/JL)

Examines three factors that influence student learning and motivation of beginner foreign-language listening skills: text, context, and gender. Studies responses of fifth graders to computer-based foreign-language learning. Results indicate that providing text with spoken words facilitates the acquisition of listening skills, increases student…

Explains what music teachers can do in the classroom to promote and develop elementary school students' attention to music learning, listening, and comprehension. States the manner of presentation is critically important. Includes guidelines for classroom teaching and describes various class activities. (NL)

This study examines whether aural processing of input in a situation of implicit instruction can build a knowledge base that is available for both comprehension and production tasks. Fifty-five Dutch students learned a miniature linguistic system based on Spanish. Three training conditions were compared in which noun-adjective gender agreement was…

The aim of the present study was to investigate the extramusical effects of a music education program in one preschool classroom over a period of six weeks. The class had not previously been exposed to regular music lessons. Readily available teaching resources containing sound recordings were used. Analysis revealed six themes that addressed the…