In typical school classrooms, children are required to listen in environments with poor acoustics and to process and comprehend complex messages from the teacher and from peers in order to achieve academic success. To predict children’s listening abilities in the classroom, research is warranted to begin to examine the specifi c aspects of comprehension that are most affected when listening in ...

The study aims at investigating incorporation of TED talks (TTs) in ESP classes with a specific focus on abundant opportunities TTs provide for teaching intensive and extensive listening. Although the importance listening comprehension is widely admitted, few scholars still claim that it remains most neglected micro-skill all, “Cinderella communication strategies”. This misbalance can be partly...

BACKGROUND Metacognition and working memory (WM) have been found associated with success in reading comprehension, but no studies have examined their combined effect on the training of reading comprehension. Another open question concerns the role of listening comprehension: In particular, it is not clear whether training to improve reading comprehension must necessarily be based on processing ...

Researchers have proposed building auditory interfaces that make use of the “cocktail party effect”—the human’s ability to selectively attend to a single talker or stream of audio among a cacophony of others—to reduce the amount of time required to listen [Arons 1992, Cohen 1992, Mullins 1993]. The premise is that by presenting multiple streams of audio simultaneously, the user will be able to ...

Based on the assumption that good decoding skills constitute a bootstrapping mechanism for reading comprehension, the present study investigated the relative contribution of the former skill to the latter compared to that of three other predictors of reading comprehension (listening comprehension, vocabulary and phonemic awareness) in 392 French-speaking first graders from low SES families. Thi...

Listening comprehension is at the heart of language learning (Kurita, 2012). It is an importantlanguage skill to develop in terms of second language acquisition (SLA) (Dunkel, 1991; Rost,2001; Vandergrift, 2007).In spite of its importance, L2 learners often regard listening as themost difficult language skill to learn. In this study, shadowing as an act or task in listening, inwhich the learner...