Because of its centrality to school success, social status, and workplace effectiveness, oral and aural skills development has been increasingly emphasized in Canadian curricula, classrooms and, very recently, large-scale assessment. The corresponding emphasis on group processes and collaborative learning has aimed to address equity issues in…

Despite the widespread use of digital video and, increasingly, multimedia in listening instruction throughout second language programs, little is known about how learners attend to dynamic visual elements in comprehension. A lack of research in how listeners engage with videotext retards the development of computer-based listening skills. This…

Assessment of auditory comprehension is necessary for therapeutic clinical intervention as well as remedial and special education services. In this study, the Test for Auditory Comprehension of Language-Revised (TACL-R), developed by Elizabeth Carrow-Woolfolk in 1985, was translated and adapted for use in the Lebanese culture. The adapted test was…

Sentence comprehension is a complex task that involves both language-specific processing components and general cognitive resources. Comprehension can be made more difficult by increasing the syntactic complexity or the presentation rate of a sentence, but it is unclear whether the same neural mechanism underlies both of these effects. In the…

This study investigated the overall intelligibility of speech produced during simultaneous communication (SC). Four hearing, experienced sign language users were recorded under SC and speech alone (SA) conditions speaking Boothroyd's (1985) forced-choice phonetic contrast material designed for measurement of speech intelligibility. Twelve…

This study investigated the acoustical and perceptual characteristics of vowels in speech produced during simultaneous communication (SC). Twelve normal hearing, experienced sign language users were recorded under SC and speech alone (SA) conditions speaking a set of sentences containing monosyllabic words designed for measurement of vowel…

In the first part of this article, Chenfeld introduces us to Ronni Spratt, a special education teacher with high energy and high expectations. Ronni asks each of her students to write (carefully written and revised) letters to the teachers of classes where they will be mainstreamed, offering tips on how they learn best. Then, Haley shows how using…

This study compared the intelligibility of native and foreign-accented English speech presented in quiet and mixed with three different levels of background noise. Two native American English speakers and four native Mandarin Chinese speakers for whom English is a second language each read a list of 50 phonetically balanced sentences (Egan, 1948).…

Two groups of listeners learned to categorize a set of unfamiliar talkers by dialect region using sentences selected from the TIMIT speech corpus. One group learned to categorize a single talker from each of six American English dialect regions. A second group learned to categorize three talkers from each dialect region. Following training, both…

In this article, the author discusses the musical interests of college students and what their musical preferences say about them. Students, through the nature of their music preferences, seem to intentionally or unintentionally convey messages. Students' listening habits can provide insight into messages that they are exposed to on a regular…

One of the central challenges for a school is the creation of a public discourse which expresses the shared purpose of the school community, without losing the multiple and different voices within the teaching staff. In this article we report on the generative potential of educational conversation, when it is structured around questions which…

For some 30 years, intelligibility has been recognized as an appropriate goal for pronunciation instruction, yet remarkably little is known about the factors that make a language learner's speech intelligible. Studies have traced correlations between features of nonnative speech and native speakers' intelligibility judgements. They have tended to…

This study determined whether listeners with hearing loss received reduced benefits due to an onset asynchrony between sounds. Seven normal-hearing listeners and 7 listeners with hearing impairment (HI) were presented with 2 synthetic, steady-state vowels. One vowel (the late-arriving vowel) was 250 ms in duration, and the other (the…

This article has two goals: to report on the trialling of fourteen 1,000 word-family lists made from the British National Corpus, and to use these lists to see what vocabulary size is needed for unassisted comprehension of written and spoken English. The trialling showed that the lists were properly sequenced and there were no glaring omissions…

This curriculum package on organization and learning skills is a product of the Workforce 2000 Partnership, which combined the resources of four educational partners and four industrial partners in Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina to provide education and training in communication, computation, and critical thinking to employees in the…