Four short articles discuss how to transcribe voice messages quickly and easily, how to learn to debate, new French expressions and games for language students. (Text is in French.) (MLA)

Provides a strategy for teachers to use to help students relate their concrete nonschool experiences to the abstract content of social studies textbooks and nonschool learning to school learning. Suggests use of a Nonschool Activity Student Profile to provide teachers with information about their students so that this may be achieved. (AEM)

This study focuses on teachers' and business managers' assessment of the importance of communication skills in the business world, specifically whether teachers underestimate or overestimate the importance of these skills and, if so, to what degree. Results of the questionnaire are reported and discussed. (CT)

Compares word-attack and comprehension skill mastery of 65 native Spanish-speaking upper elementary students in a bilingual English/Spanish program and 55 native Spanish-speaking students of the same grade levels in an English monolingual program. There was no significant difference in the word-attack skills of the two groups but the bilingual…

Indicates that segmentation significantly aided the comprehension of narrative and expository materials for hearing impaired students who read at a second-grade level. (NKA)

Notes that expository text, the predominant form of writing in content textbooks, is generally more difficult for students to comprehend than narrative, which predominates in basal readers. Recommends the use of extended anticipation guides as a strategy for helping students build background knowledge for understanding content area texts. (SKC)

College students (N=180), in first-semester and second-semester Spanish at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, were each given a short text and one of five assessment tasks to determine if comprehension of the subjunctive is necessarily due to prior instruction in its form and use or can be achieved without instruction. Text and…

Since listening comprehension presupposes an orderly conversion of running speech into discrete linguistic units, certain restoration processes must apply. An approach is provided to explain the metamorphosis that language undergoes from dynamic speech representations to citation form strings, under listening conditions. Some performance…

Examines the word-reading strategies of a sample of second- and third-grade students in normal classrooms, focusing on the students' relative reliance on decoding versus sight-word associations. Suggests that lack of efficient decoding skills will begin to take a toll on reading comprehension by grade 3. (SR)

A discourse analysis of videotaped teaching demonstrations by 18 Korean and Chinese teaching assistants reveals these non-native speakers of English lack the mastery of those cues, such as prosody and topicalization, that allow native speaker/listeners to perceive intended relationships among the ideas presented. (DJD)

Study guides for learning-disabled students can improve their comprehension of textbook readings. Guidelines for developing, using, and modifying study guides are provided. A sample study guide on early Latin American civilizations is given, followed by a sample test covering the study guide material. (Author/JDD)

Studies on reading comprehension for bilingual students are reviewed to examine the importance of first-language mastery prior to second-language acquisition. Immersion program factors analyzed include automaticity, plateau effects, need for a variety of sociolinguistic settings, oral facility versus cognitive academic linguistic abilities, and…

Discusses the need for reader orientation to the text and procedures for working through discourse to encourage selection and organization of main ideas. Students can summarize more effectively if they process and reformulate the text first. Sample text and student summmaries are appended. (Author/LMO)

Explains why proficient readers may find it difficult to understand written directions. Indicates direct instructional strategies for helping such readers handle procedural text independently. (NKA)

When learning-disabled high school students (N=22) were taught about astronomy by either presenting key concepts with a visual spatial display or by presenting concepts with texts, tests measuring short-term mastery of content favored students taught with the visual display. No differences were found between the groups on transfer or maintenance.…