An approach to increasing intermediate students' listening comprehension of conversational Spanish used video materials taped from real Spanish TV broadcasts. Careful breakdown into comprehensible units, combined with repetition and then student reproduction, improved listening skills in the class more than did conventional methods in control…

It is argued that software developers should use a combination of methodologies to determine the reading difficulties of lower-level foreign language students. The Penn State experience with ClearText is reported. (12 references) (Author/LB)

Exploration of the role of listening comprehension in facilitating second-language learning includes discussion of the auditory perception of language, listening disadvantages for second-language learners, the need to concentrate on lexical knowledge rather than ear training, minimum word knowledge requirements, and lexical ignorance as a major…

A discussion of the Total Physical Response method of second language instruction places the concept within the context of other unconventional language learning methods, reviews the rationale behind the approach, and outlines the classroom procedures used. A sampling of useful commands for classroom use is included. (19 references) (MSE)

Describes a project-driven classroom that elaborates on the conventional role play, implementing the instructional goals of the National Standards in Foreign Language Education project, while presenting possible solutions to the issue of listening-comprehension anxiety. (Author/VWL)

Finds that English-speaking students learning Japanese were most likely to obtain correct answers when interpreting novel kanji compounds (words consisting of two or more Chinese characters) when both words in isolation and contextual clues were available. Shows that morphological analysis is an independent strategy from guessing word meanings…

Describes the design and implementation of a computer-based listening test--the "Text dictation." The article first discusses the importance of listening centering on a coherent text, rather than short listening fragments, and discusses drawbacks of listening programs wherein the required responses consist of noninteractive test types, such as…

Discusses using students' native language (L1) versus second language in testing instruments for reading comprehension in the second language (L2) classroom. Students of college-level Spanish were tested under different conditions involving combinations of the L1 and L2. Suggests using open-ended reading comprehension tests if some questions are…

Offers a cognitive perspective on the comprehension problems of second language listeners by identifying real-time listening difficulties faced by English-as-Second-Language learners and examining these difficulties within the three-phase model of language comprehension proposed by Anderson (1995). Shows ten problems that occurred during the…

Think-aloud protocols were gathered to establish that first-year college level participants noticed targeted linguistic forms (Spanish formal imperatives) while reading an enhanced or unenhanced text. Suggests there are no significant benefits of written input enhancement over unenhanced written input for the amount of reported noticing of Spanish…

This study assessed the effects of Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS), a reciprocal classwide peer-tutoring strategy, on the reading performance of native Spanish-speaking students with learning disabilities (LD) and their low-, average-, and high-achieving classroom peers. Participants were 132 native Spanish-speaking English language…

This study first explores intermediate-level English learners' preferences for hypermedia annotations while they are engaged in reading a hypermedia text. Second, it examines whether multimedia annotations facilitate reading comprehension in the second language. The participants were 44 adult learners of English as a foreign language studying…

The present chapter bridges two lines of neurocognitive research, which are, despite being related, usually discussed separately from each other. The two fields, second language (L2) sentence comprehension and artificial grammar processing, both depend on the successful learning of complex sequential structures. The comparison of the two research…

The paper reviewed studies in word-level processing skills and related areas, and profiled how the development of L2 word recognition and integration skills would contribute to autonomous "kango" (Chinese originated words or words created from Chinese originated words) vocabulary learning. Despite the fact that the acquisition of a…

The present article reports on a study investigating the interaction of a reading comprehension test with gender in a formal testing context and the performance of males and females on reading test items with regard to demands on strategy use. Participants were 187 (59 = female and 128 = male) international students ranging from 17 to 20 years of…