Background: Children with diagnoses of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) frequently have reading problems. To date, it is not clear whether poor reading is associated with both inattention and hyperactivity and also whether poor reading comprehension is the result of poor word reading skills or more general language comprehension…

This study explores the differential effects of medium of delivery of aural input during listening tasks on learners noticing and type of comprehension (top-down and bottom-up) of Spanish object pronouns during focus on form listening tasks. Twenty-two college students enrolled in second year Spanish in a technology-enhanced classroom participated…

This paper discusses the findings of a qualitative study on the strategies employed by Iranian freshmen in extensive listening. A group of 12 freshman university students were purposefully selected based on their scores in the Oxford Placement Test administered. Four learners were identified as advanced, four as intermediate, and four as lower…

Most second/foreign language (L2) learners have difficulty understanding listening input because of its implicit and ephemeral nature, and they typically have better reading comprehension than listening comprehension skills. This study examines the effects of using an interactive advance-organizer activity on the DVD video comprehension of L2…

This study had three main aims. First, we examined to what extent listening comprehension, vocabulary, grammatical skills and verbal short-term memory (VSTM) assessed prior to formal reading instruction explained individual differences in early reading comprehension levels. Second, we examined to what extent the three common component skills,…

Purpose: This study examined the effects of lexical tone contour on the intelligibility of Mandarin sentences in quiet and in noise. Method: A text-to-speech synthesis engine was used to synthesize Mandarin sentences with each word carrying the original lexical tone, flat tone, or a tone randomly selected from the 4 Mandarin lexical tones. The…

This research studies an elementary classroom of all English language learners (ELLs) for the use of forms of gesture without speech for private communication. This private-public modality allowed the teacher to attend to individuals without significant disruption of her concurrent speech. Students also used this modality in various contexts as…

Most spoken texts that are used in second language (L2) listening classroom activities are scripted texts, where the text is written, revised, polished, and then read aloud with artificially clear enunciation and slow rate of speech. This article explores the field's overreliance on these scripted texts, at the expense of including unscripted…

In order to comprehend speech, listeners have to combine low-level phonetic information about the incoming auditory signal with higher-order contextual information to make a lexical selection. This requires stable phonological categories and unambiguous representations of words in the mental lexicon. Unlike native speakers, second language (L2)…

This study details the development of six second language learners in an English listening course that focused on developing their bottom-up listening skills. The research employed longitudinal multi-case studies to chart the development of these lower proficiency-level Taiwanese university learners, and their progress in the course was analysed…

This article reports on an exploratory case study of a Japanese learner of English as a foreign language (EFL) who was introduced to metatextual skills and activities for metacognitive instruction as a route towards promoting her autonomous use of the BBC's online "From Our Own Correspondent" podcasts outside of the classroom to…

The aim of this study was twofold: we investigated (a) the effect of two types of captioned video (i.e., on-screen text in the same language as the video) on listening comprehension; (b) L2 learners' perception of the usefulness of captions while watching L2 video. The participants, 226 university-level students from a Flemish university,…

For many EFL learners, listening poses a grave challenge. The difficulty in segmenting a stream of speech and limited capacity in short-term memory are common weaknesses for language learners. Specifically, reduced forms, which frequently appear in authentic informal conversations, compound the challenges in listening comprehension. Numerous…

The study examined the role of oral language skills in reading comprehension and listening comprehension levels of 125 monolingual (L1) and bilingual (L2) English-speaking learners (M = 121.5 months, SD = 4.65) in England. All testing was conducted in English. The L1 learners outperformed their L2 peers on the measures of oral language and text…

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…