Discusses general strategies and specific devices to motivate intermediate and advanced students to use the language laboratory frequently and efficiently. Suggests types of materials most effective for language laboratory use. (PMJ)

High school French students showed greater achievement in language skills and more positive attitudes toward French when taught with learning activity packages in French culture. (Editor)

Discusses four major problems in defining speaking and listening as basic skills: lack of systematic attention to social communication, the need to identify salient social contexts for literate communication behavior, the need to explicate behaviors one must exhibit to be considered literate, and the difficulty in assessing functional…

Discusses the usefulness of the speech expander and the speech compressor in second language instruction, particularly as concerns the development of listening comprehension skills. (AM)

Demonstrates how recordings of radio programs can be used in the French classroom for listening comprehension and writing skill development. (AM)

This article discusses how a language laboratory can be used effectively in an English as a second language/English as a foreign language program. The lab should be used primarily for listening comprehension, not for drill and repetition. (CFM)

Compared two-month old's abilities to detect changes in word order for sequences spoken as a well-formed sentence versus two unrelated, but well-formed, sentence fragments. Results suggest that infants are able to remember the order of spoken words when they are embedded within the coherent prosodic structure of a single well-formed sentence. (HTH)

Summarizes the use of word-spotting in psycholinguistic research. Notes that listeners hear a list of nonsense words, some of which contain embedded real words, and they detect those embedded words, a task designed to study the segmentation of continuous speech. Describes the task and summarizes its advantages and disadvantages. (12 references)…

This study evaluated an assessment procedure designed to assess speech recognition ability in individuals with mild-to-moderate hearing losses. Sets of phonetic contrasts were presented within sentence contexts to 53 listeners (31 hearing impaired) in four listening conditions. The procedure distinguished between normal and hearing impaired…

Presents a study of the acquisition of English-as-a-Foreign-Language vocabulary through academic listening. Explored the effects of EFL proficiency and lecture comprehension on vocabulary acquisition as well as the relationship between vocabulary gain and the following factors: frequency of occurrence, types of word, type of word elaboration, and…

Investigated the effects of frequent dictation on the listening comprehension ability of elementary English-as-a-Foreign-Language learners. Subjects were two homogenous groups of elementary EFL students at the Kish Language Institute in Tehran, Iran. Results showed dictation had a significant effect on the listening comprehension ability of the…

Recommends focus groups as a useful research methodology for supplementing other, more commonly used measures of qualitative and quantitative assessment. Explains how focus groups can be used to examine teacher and practitioner perspectives of effective technical writing. Provides suggestions on how focus groups can also be used for evaluating…

Beginning level French students in Grades 4-6 completed listening comprehension tasks and reflective exercises using instruments that engaged them in prediction, evaluation, and other processes involved in listening. Results suggest that use of these instruments helped sensitize students to the processes underlying second language listening…

Explains that students who participated in a Grade 11 English media/communication course that incorporated extensive critical media analysis were compared with students who received no such instruction. Notes that the students' reading comprehension, writing skills, critical reading, critical listening, and critical viewing skills for nonfiction…