The Listening Circle is a learning activity that is designed to provide students with the opportunity to connect listening knowledge with observed behaviors and to strengthen student peer feedback. Not knowing how to give feedback can result in messages that are confusing, tactless, and counter-productive. Many feedback messages leave the receiver…

The current study was designed to investigate the role played by verbal memory in the advantage shown by individuals with Down syndrome in reading over listening text comprehension (Roch & Levorato, 2009). Two different aspects of verbal memory were analyzed: processing load and coding modality. Participants were 20 individuals with Down syndrome,…

"Professional Learning Community: Emergent Literacy" was developed to support preschool teachers through collaborative learning experiences in a literacy professional learning community (PLC). PLCs are a form of professional development in which small groups of educators with shared interests work together with the goals of expanding…

Good listening and pronunciation skills lead to successes in foreign language learning. The main purpose of this study was to examine the benefits of adopting the Proprioceptive Method in learning English by Thai local government officials with the help of Facebook. A seventeen-day training course was implemented, comprising two days of…

In most large-scale programs of tests that aid in making high-stakes decisions, such as the "TOEIC"® family of products and service, it is not unusual for a significant portion of test takers to retake the test at multiple times.The study reported here used multilevel growth modeling to explore the score change patterns of nearly 20,000…

Problem Statement: The ubiquity of anxious teacher candidates (TCs) for English as a foreign language (EFL) in listening classes and their needs for understanding aural input call for deep concern by foreign-language (FL) teacher educators. Purpose of Study: As a teacher educator, in my undergraduate-level listening classes, I have frequently…

Background: Oral language skills are a critical foundation for literacy and more generally for educational success. The current study shows that oral language skills can be improved by providing suitable additional help to children with language difficulties in the early stages of formal education. Methods: We conducted a randomized controlled…

Thanks to the increased accessibility of multimedia technology, video texts have been widely used in teaching English in Chinese foreign language classrooms. This trend provides great impetus for changes in the means of assessing listening in both achievement and proficiency tests, and suggests the potential possibility of supplanting the…

This study investigated the continuous influence of applying formative assessment on EFL (English as a foreign language) learners' anxiety and listening efficacy. The participants, divided into an experimental and a control group, were 60 Iranian EFL learners in an English-language institute. This study thus highlights the pedagogical implications…

The Brigance Comprehensive Inventory of Basic Skills-II (CIBS-II) is a diagnostic battery intended for children in grades 1st through 6th. The aim of this study was to test for item invariance, or differential item functioning (DIF), of the CIBS-II across sex in the standardization sample through the use of item response theory DIF detection…

Purpose: This study examined the effects of envelope dynamic-range mismatch on the intelligibility of Mandarin speech in noise by simulated bilateral electric hearing. Method: Noise-vocoded Mandarin speech, corrupted by speech-shaped noise at 5 and 0 dB signal-to-noise ratios, was presented unilaterally or bilaterally to 10 normal-hearing…

Two studies explored the relation between listening comprehension of text and listening comprehension of sentences in preschoolers aged 4 to 5 years, 11 months. The first study analyzed this relationship taking into account the role of lower level components, namely, word knowledge and verbal working memory, as possible mediators. These components…

Background: Discourse coherence is a reflection of the listener's ability to interpret the overall meaning conveyed by the speaker. Measuring global coherence (maintenance of thematic unity of the discourse) is useful for quantifying communication impairments at the discourse level in clinical populations and for measuring response to…

This study investigates willingness to communicate (WTC) and its determinants through structural equation modelling (SEM). Building on models by MacIntyre and Charos (1996) and Yashima (2002), it addresses 3 apparent gaps in the current knowledge base: It is the first SEM-based WTC study in a Western European context, investigating French as a…

This study was inspired by Qian (1999) and Staehr (2009) and researched 88 Chinese learners who had already passed the College English Test 4 (CET). These learners volunteered to participate in the study regarding the depth and breadth of vocabulary knowledge and its relationship with listening comprehension, which was assessed by analyzing the…