Despite its importance in the development of second language (L2) proficiency, there is little research on listening comprehension in a second language. Evidence for the role of most factors that may impact second language listening is sparse. One practical factor often mentioned in relation to the difficulty of L2 listening passages is length, but there are several problems with characterizing...

Perceived benefit, satisfaction, and hearing aid use patterns were measured in a follow-up study to a large-scale multi-site clinical trial conducted in 1996-97. Measures included the Hearing Aid Status Questionnaire, the Profile of Hearing Aid Benefit, the Glasgow Hearing Aid Benefit Profile, the Satisfaction with Amplification in Daily Life, and the International Outcome Inventory for Hearing...

Arab learners may experience a great difficulty in attending to listening comprehension activities due to different chunks of the target language they are engaged in. As such, learners should be informed as to what is the best technique that helped them overcome this difficulty. This paper attempts to investigate the efficacy of using visual multimedia technique (i.e., video mode + test) in mul...

OBJECTIVES Difficulty in understanding speech in background noise is frequently reported by hearing-impaired people despite well-fitted amplification. Understanding speech in the presence of background noise involves segregating the various auditory stimuli into distinct streams using cues such as pitch characteristics, spatial location of speakers, and contextual information. One possible caus...

The Japanese adaptation of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR-J) is a tailored version of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), designed to better meet the needs of Japanese learners of English. The CEFR-J, like the CEFR, uses illustrative  descriptors  known  as  can-do  statements,  that  describe  achievement  goals  for five  skills  (listening,  reading,  spoken ...

Listening to speech in noise can be exhausting, especially for older adults with impaired hearing. Pupil dilation is thought to track the difficulty associated with listening to speech at various intelligibility levels for young and middle-aged adults. This study examined changes in the pupil response with acoustic and lexical manipulations of difficulty in older adults with hearing loss. Parti...

This study introduces a tool, partial and synchronized caption (PSC), for training second language (L2) listening skill. PSC uses an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system to realize word-level alignment between text and speech while it refers to the corpora to effectively select a subset of words for inclusion in the caption. The selection criteria are based on three features contributing t...

A learner’s language data of speaking, writing, listening, and reading have been compiled for a learner corpus in this study. The language data consist of linguistic output and language processing. Linguistic output refers to data of pronunciation, sentences, listening comprehension rate, and reading comprehension rate. Language processing refers to processing time and learners’ self-judgment o...