A study to determine the effect of 50 percent compression rate of speech on teacher comprehension revealed that there was no significant different in comprehension by teachers listening to audio tapes at a 50 percent compression rate and those listening at a normal speech rate. (LRA)

An investigation of a saturation advertising campaign to acquaint the public with changes in radio wavelengths showed that repeated presentation of material does not lead to learning unless appropriate encoding occurs. Such encoding will occur when subjects are allowed to use previously acquired learning strategies. (PMJ)

Criticizes the revised examination for the English Certificate, Oral Section, on these points: validity and reliability of the examination forms, and claims of authenticity, range, and accuracy in evaluation of language competence in the section called "Everyday Situations." (IFS/WGA)

In a study 12 normal children and 12 reading disabled (word recognition difficulties) children (mean age 9.2 years) were compared for reading and listening comprehension to test whether disabled readers, given an auditory presentation, would show comprehension of material comparable to that of normal readers given visual presentation. (PHR)

Reports on two studies exploring the contrast effects in judgments of messages exhibiting high or low lexical and syntactic diversity. Suggests that listeners are sensitive to variations in lexical diversity but not syntactic diversity. (RL)

Presents a method which involves the students in the creation of dialogues, thereby yielding dialogues which are interesting to the student and contextually appropriate. (AM)

Describes a study in which Australian high school learners of Japanese were given the opportunity to practice their communicative skills with native speakers. Students' performances were analyzed before and after a brief period of introspection. Results indicate that learners made few gains in terms of their own output although there was an…

The Speech Perception in Noise Test was administered to nine native-Mexican Spanish-speaking adults who learned English either before age 6 or after age 14 and nine monolingual American-English adults. Levels of noise at which speech was intelligible were significantly higher and the benefit from context was significantly greater for monolinguals…

Discusses the attitudes of students concerning the benefit of Year 12 foreign language courses to the development of their oral and aural proficiency in the target language, i.e., French. While most students felt that their ability to speak and understand spoken French had improved as a result of the course, some expressed dissatisfaction with…

Ascertains the influence of the development of receptive phonetic skills on the level of listening comprehension of adults learning French as a second language in a formal setting. Test results indicate substantial gains in phonetics by the experimental group and a significant difference between the performance of experimental and control groups.…

Emphasizes that auditory lexical decision has wide applicability and that the paradigm is currently used to study basic processes in word recognition, the nature of the mental lexicon, effects of word frequency, neighbor effects and various other phenomena of isolated word perception. Article reviews the strengths and weaknesses of this task. (54…

Discusses how to implement student self-assessment and large-group assessment in the high school instrumental music classroom. Reports on the students' thoughts about these assessment types. Includes various forms to assist in assessment. (CMK)

Presents a lesson plan that can be utilized within an U.S. history survey course. Introduces students to oral history and unusual primary sources, specifically narratives of a senior citizen. Includes a description of the procedure, sample interview questions, and suggestions for conducting an oral history interview. (CMK)

Efficiency, precision, and concurrent validity of results from adaptive and fixed-item music listening tests were studied using: (1) 2,200 simulated examinees; (2) 204 live examinees; and (3) 172 live examinees. Results support the usefulness of adaptive tests for measuring skills that require aurally produced items. (SLD)

A study compared intelligibility and speech rate differences following speaker implementation of 3 strategies (topic, alphabet, and combined topic and alphabet supplementation) and a habitual speech control condition for 5 speakers with severe dysarthria. Combined cues and alphabet cues yielded significantly higher intelligibility scores and…