Points out the difference between "education," to increase intellectual awareness, and "training," to make someone proficient at a given task. Suggests that the formula for real training has four components: (1) define the measure of skillfulness required; (2) define the measurable outcome desired; (3) educate quickly and precisely; and (4) train…

Analysis of the effect of an authentic, unedited French radio program on student listening skills found that listening comprehension improved with increased exposure to authentic speech, suggesting that adjusting levels of speech speed, content, and form according to students' developing comprehension might not be essential to improving listening…

Investigates the degree to which listeners are sensitive to the social relations expressed in choice of a name when referring to a third person during a conversation. Concludes that the social information inherent in names is picked up by readers and encoded into memory. (HB)

Explores one aspect of the relationship between intonation and punctuation. Outlines the historical development of punctuation, and compares twentieth-century punctuation rules with what is known about the division of connected speech into intonation-groups. Suggests that, where syntactic prescription and intonational usage conflict, a return to…

Examined whether developmental differences exist in availability of inferences during listening comprehension. Presented child and adult subjects with consistent and inconsistent passages to determine outcome of expected and unexpected messages on memory. Found that children were more likely than adults to retain incorrect information in active…

Investigates whether children can demonstrate awareness of musical expression by discriminating between expressive and mechanical music fragments, performing similar songs, and describing the fragments and songs. Indicates task improvement with age, significant differences between kindergarten and fourth-grade scores in perception and description,…

States that many English teachers find themselves responsible for an expanded English curriculum that includes the (new) language arts of speaking and listening. Outlines practical ways teachers can incorporate appropriate instruction into a full curriculum. Offers specific information about the processes of informal speaking, formal speaking,…

Unlike traditional management development, use of conversations in coaching high-performance work teams addresses core processes of speaking and listening. Management of conversations aims to create learning that will lead to breakthroughs in team performance. (SK)

This study explored the sensitivity of 20 10- to 11-month-old infants to the phonological characteristics of their native language. Tone-probe event-related potentials were obtained for subjects listening to a story, either with normal English function morphemes or modified with atypical function morphemes. Results suggest that the 11-month-olds,…

The contribution of reduced speaking rate to the intelligibility of "clear" speech was evaluated by adjusting the durations of speech segments in various ways for both hard-of-hearing listeners and listeners with normal hearing. The intelligibility advantage of clear speech over conversational speech was confirmed for both groups of…

This study evaluated speech intelligibility under noise conditions of varying peaks (10, 20, and 30 decibels) in frequency response, with 26 listeners with sensorineural impaired hearing who used hearing aids and 10 listeners with normal hearing. Results indicated that the peaks affected speech intelligibility more for listeners with impaired than…

Best-selling author and educator Donald Graves draws on his experiences as student and teacher to discuss immersing oneself in a subject with students, listening to student perspectives, encouraging students to describe what works for them, teaching by showing, being honest with students, and focusing on one thing a student can fix to improve his…

Political listening is an essential practice of democratic citizenship in world of inequality and cultural conflict. Critical adult educators should foster an infrastructure for respectful communication toward the goal of building a civil and tolerable society. (Contains 21 references.) (SK)

We investigated the relationship between ear advantage scores on the Fused Dichotic Words Test (FDWT), and laterality of activation in fMRI using a verb generation paradigm in fourteen children with epilepsy. The magnitude of the laterality index (LI), based on spatial extent and magnitude of activation in classical language areas (BA 44/45,…

Video games have become increasingly more popular and more technologically advanced. This one-month study used interview, observation, self-report, and reading and listening test data to demonstrate and investigate how one intermediate Japanese-as-a-foreign-language (JFL) student improved his listening comprehension and kanji character recognition…