This study compared a story-based video instructional package, with a feature-length film as its focus, to a text-based program. It explored the effectiveness of each approach to enhance the listening and grammar performances of intermediate-level college French students. Twenty-seven students at two institutions participated. A pretest-posttest…

Adopting a literacy perspective towards student interactions with digital media can extend and develop views of second language (L2) listening comprehension. In this case study, variations in "play" are grounded in a media literacy perspective as a way to frame student work with authentic videotext. Twenty-two Australian students of…

This research focuses on the ability of book-based animated stories, when well designed and produced, to have positive effects on young viewers' narrative comprehension and language skills. Sixty 5-year-olds, learning Dutch as a 2nd language, were randomly assigned to 4 experimental and 2 control conditions. The children profited to some extent…

This study explored comprehension monitoring, use of reading strategies and reading comprehension of bilingual students at different levels of perceived proficiency in Italian. The participants were bilingual fifth to eighth-grade elementary school students from four Italian schools in Rijeka, Croatia. Students' reading comprehension was assessed.…

This article puts forward a project approach and a set of solutions to better prepare foreign students wishing to enter engineering schools in France. It focuses on how we train students to understand scientific presentations through intensive listening comprehension. Within this framework, it proposes a new educational ICT model that is original…

This article points out the difficulty of finding computer assisted language learning (CALL) software that is both appropriate for teachers' pedagogical needs and user friendly. Authoring programs offer simplicity but little flexibility. Innovative software requires the use of authentic programming languages or more sophisticated software. The…

The issue of what exactly is measured by different types of reading items has been a matter of interest in the field of reading research for many years. Language teaching and testing specialists have raised the question of whether a reading test for foreign students wishing to enter a university in the United States should include questions…

The effects of specific guidelines in the taking and rating of tests of language summarizing ability were investigated, as well as interrater agreement regarding the rating of specific ideas within the summaries. The tests involved respondents reading source texts and providing written summaries as a measure of their reading comprehension and…

The study investigated the role of a second language (L2) learner's prior cultural knowledge in target language lexical meaning-making. Comparison focuses on what important similarities in L2 lexical meaning-making of culturally loaded words appear among learners with the same ethnic background, and what important lexical meaning differences exist…

A study investigated whether adult anglophone readers of French could be taught to use the organizational patterns (top-level structures, or TLSs) in expository text and whether they could then use this knowledge (the structure strategy) to facilitate reading comprehension as measured quantitatively through immediate free recall. Subjects were 43…

Grade 3 and grade 4 classrooms in a California bilingual Spanish/English environment were studied. In the first study, reading lessons were observed and analyzed in a bilingual classroom. Using the analysis of this experience, in the second study a series of theory-driven experimental interventions were initiated. It was found that the achievement…

A guide for teachers of second language reading offers ideas for using authentic texts as instructional materials. The guide focuses on how to teach students to become strategic readers and use their background knowledge to enhance comprehension. Schema theory is proposed as a framework for approaching reading tasks, by providing relevant pre- and…

Focusing on how children learn to read in a language they have previously only spoken, this book illustrates the skill theory of reading development, which encompasses both new perceptual processes and modified but familiar integrative cognitive processes of language comprehension. The chapters discuss the following aspects of learning to read:…

A study of the information gained by students in the process of taking a cloze test in English as a second language was conducted with 34 full-time undergraduate foreign students at a state university. The subjects came from a variety of native language backgrounds. A 35-item cloze test was developed in which every eighth word was deleted,…

A discussion of the connections between mathematics, language, and second language acquisition focuses on four major areas: (1) the nature of mathematical performance, (2) the language of mathematics, (3) problems that mathematics poses for limited-English-proficient (LEP) children learning English as a second language, and (4) mathematics as a…