Describes several techniques for implementing commercial radio to improve listening comprehension skills in the foreign language student. Canadian radio, accessible to much of the northern United States, brings news, weather, and sports, in French, to the student of French and provides major components for sharpening comprehension skills. (PJM)

Investigated (1) whether young children can extract a story's main idea, (2) how much they can recall from stories, (3) whether their recall is related to the main theme, (4) whether recall occurs in logical sequence, and (5) from which part of a story more ideas are remembered. (Author/DB)

Concludes that there is a general language comprehension deficit in poor readers. (DD)

Describes a method, used in intermediate French classes on the university level, which uses films to improve listening comprehension skills. (AM)

Presents a language processing model that distinguishes four functional components of reading and listening: feature detection, primary recognition, secondary recognition, and rehearsal and recoding. Uses the model to describe and incorporate some recent research. (GT)

This research was designed to measure the abilities of black and white students in determining the race and status of a speaker. Forty black and white college undergraduates listened to a tape recording of 24 voices and were asked to distinguish sex, race, and status of speaker. The hypothesis that black students would be more skillful at this…

Compared student performance in listening comprehension in German as a second language classes when three advance organizers plus video- and audiotapes were used, as opposed to when neither advance organizers nor video- and audiotapes were used. Findings indicate that students in the group using the organizers and tapes developed superior…

Studied effects of three conditions on fourth-grade students' vocabulary acquisition: (1) listening to stories, with brief explanation of unfamiliar words; (2) listening to stories with no explanation of unfamiliar words; and (3) having no exposure to stories or to word explanations. Found that simple word explanations in the context of an…

Notes that speech intelligibility has traditionally been measured by presenting words mixed in noise to listeners for identification at different signal-to-noise ratios. The words are produced in isolation or in sequence contexts where the predictability of specific items can be varied. Emphasizes that the technique provides valuable data about…

Focuses on how music teachers can make choral rehearsals more interesting for students by incorporating creative lessons and activities. Explores what it means to be creative and includes examples of creative lessons that can be used in the choral rehearsal. (CMK)

Although second language textbooks rarely provide songs or many song-related exercises, music excels at alleviating students' tension, enlivening the atmosphere, and offering teachers opportunities to emphasize pedagogical concepts, whether linguistic or cultural. A series of easy-to-use activities is provided that will work with most songs and is…

The influence of selected cognitive factors on age-related changes in speech recognition was examined by measuring the effects of recall task, speech rate, and availability of contextual cues on the recognition performance of 10 young listeners (ages 18-40) and 10 older listeners (ages 65-76). Hearing loss affected performance. (Author/CR)

Describes a freshman-level communications course within a business college that uses holistic instruction and that fuses the language arts to help students with college-level reading, writing, speaking, and listening. (SR)

Compares the Intermediate Ear to Hand Test melodic-imitation and tone-quality scores between students who played their teacher's major instrument and students who played a different instrument. Finds statistically significant higher scores on overall performance quality among students who played their teacher's instrument than among the other…