This volume offers a set of listening activities at three levels of proficiency on the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages proficiency scale: Novice, Intermediate, and Advanced. It has been designed to accompany any type of textbook with any type of instruction. Its purpose is to provide learners with the opportunity to hear…

Asking questions is a salient event in group learning environments such as classrooms. Laboratory experimental results indicate that co-learner questions can affect judgments of comprehension. A study involving 94 male and 209 female students at a large midwestern university examined whether students would be aware of such alterations in…

The summary information in this report provides teachers, school administrators, students, and the general public in Alberta, Canada with an overview of results from the June 1998 administration of the English 30 Diploma Examination. The information in the report is most helpful when used in conjunction with the detailed school and jurisdiction…

Aiming to make the literacy tutoring task as easy and effective as possible, this guidebook presents a set of strategies that tutors can implement immediately as they begin to work with students and provides enough information about the elements of literacy learning and effective instruction so tutors can make sensible decisions about the best…

This paper discusses six instructional components that meet the literacy needs of all students and address all of the components of a balanced and comprehensive approach to reading instruction: (1) phonemic awareness (the understanding that spoken words and syllables are made up of sequences of elementary speech sounds); (2) letter names and…

The speech introduces a colloquium on the teaching of listening comprehension to students of English for academic purposes (EAP). The colloquium's aim is to address ways that EAP instructors can improve students' lecture listening skills by discussing the types of background discourse knowledge and listening strategies that…

Two experiments investigated the role of capacity in children's comprehension of relative clause sentences. Sentences varied in number of participant roles, focus (object, subject), and embeddedness (center-embedded, right-branching). Center-embeddedness and object-focus were expected to constrain individuals toward assigning more nouns to their…

When students use concept maps to construct and represent their understandings, these concept maps can be analyzed for representation of understanding from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. In this study, a qualitative approach was utilized to extend the interpretations from the quantitative analysis of students' conceptual…

A study examined the effect of cooperative learning on the reading comprehension of 16 second-grade students. A modified Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (CIRC) program was used with the experimental group over a 20-week period. A control group of 17 students was taught to read using traditional whole-group instruction with a…

This study investigated hearing-impaired students' understanding of the mathematical concept of fractional numbers, as measured by their ability to determine the order and equivalence of fractional numbers. Twenty-one students (ages 10-16) with hearing impairments were compared with 26 students with normal hearing. The study concluded that…

A study determined the effect of three types of text structures (attribution, comparison, and collection) on fifth graders' reading comprehension. Subjects, 71 students from 3 classrooms in 1 public elementary school in southern California, were randomly assigned to 1 of those 3 conditions. There was no instruction given. Students read…

A practicum addressed the problem of poor reading comprehension of average ability third graders in a southeastern U.S. elementary school. The target group consisted of 24 third-grade students from a low socio-economic background. The reading program was initiated to improve reading comprehension skills. The average test score on the basal reading…

A study investigated the degree to which the page layout of a book affects the young reader's association of text with appropriate illustrations. Four hundred native French-speaking third-graders in eight Montreal (Canada) schools participated. In a third-grade text about animals, the names of the animals illustrated in pictures and other words…

A study investigated factors in design of oral language comprehension tests and their relevance in determining actual language proficiency, focusing on the tests' decoding requirements. Task-based, interactive oral language tests were designed: (1) to elicit information about integration of first (L1) and second languages (L2) in the learner's…

This paper examines one section of the objective paper of the Hong Kong Examination Authority's (HKEA) Use of English Examination. One of the test types in this section of the examination involves candidates completing a cloze passage based on a text. It is the HKEA's contention that the exercise involves summarizing/paraphrasing skills. The…