Effects of Strength of Accent on an L2 Interactive Lecture Listening Comprehension Test

This article reports on a study which aimed to determine the effect of strength of accent on listening comprehension of interactive lectures. Test takers (N = 21,726) listened to an interactive lecture given by one of nine speakers and responded to six comprehension items. The test taker responses were analyzed with the Rasch computer program WINSTEPS to investigate the relative difficulty of the items associated with the nine versions of the interactive lectures. Results indicated that comprehension of interactive lectures was diminished with quite light accents, as has been found with monologic lectures.     

What Makes a Good Listener? Listening Behavior in Instructional Settings

Listening as a language skill is widely required in instructional settings at any level. It is proposed to view listening as an active process, involving patterns of behavior which can be categorized as content-, self-, and speaker-related activities. A questionnaire (N = 554) and a qualitative survey (N = 32) were conducted to investigate the knowledge about listening strategies among university students. Results show that the scope of listening skills is rather limited even among experienced listeners and that there is considerable room for modifying listening behavior. Consequences for conceptualizing listening expertise are discussed and areas for further reaearch, both empirical and theoretical, are addressed.     

Reviews of Academic English Listening Tests for Non-Native Speakers

This article presents a review of 20 tests designed for assessing the academic English listening skill of second or foreign language learners. The available test information has been systematically condensed in purpose, listening construct, task characteristics, and validity evidence. It was found that most of the tests were developed for proficiency and placement purposes in academic contexts, with few of the tests serving for making workplace decisions. Also, global, local, and inferential skills constitute the construct in most listening comprehension tests. A practical approach for justifying the uses of these tests for different stakeholders is discussed. This review is a valuable resource for educators, administrators, test developers, and researchers looking for a comprehensive analysis of existing English tests that assess listening comprehension in second or foreign language learners.     

Examining the Role of Concentration,Vocabulary and Self-concept in Listening and Reading Comprehension

Listening is regarded as a key requirement for successful communication and is fundamentally linked to other language skills. Unlike reading, it requires both hearing and processing information in real-time. We therefore propose that the ability to concentrate is a strong predictor of listening comprehension. Using structural equation modeling, concentration was found to be a strong predictor of listening comprehension in a sample of 345 sixth graders in Switzerland. In contrast, the ability to concentrate did not predict successful reading comprehension. The most important predictor of both listening and reading comprehension was vocabulary.     

A Survey of Listening Instruction in the Basic Speech Course

This survey of 498 institutions seeks to learn how institutions teach listening in the basic speech course. Respondents included community colleges and four year colleges, with and without degree programs. The results reveal most schools offer some listening instruction in the basic course, averaging 7% of a semester course (approximately three hours). Less than 50% of this time is devoted to skill development. The dominant methods of instruction are lecture and listening activities. Methods of modeling, role playing and the use of audio/video tapes and listening tests increase, as the emphasis on skill development increases. Typically, those who teach the basic course have had little specific training in listening. However, there is a positive correlation between the training of the senior faculty and junior faculty.     

A Content-Based Approach to Teaching and Testing Listening Skills to Grade 5 EFL Learners

English education has been officially incorporated into elementary-level education in Taiwan since 2001, with the key objective of reinforcing pupils’ oral communication in class. Although oral interaction involves a degree of listening input from interlocutors, listening has unfortunately remained a marginalized area in Taiwanese elementary education. Little is known about how to improve young learners’ listening comprehension and listening skills in Taiwanese contexts. The present study was carried out with 52 11-year-old elementary school pupils in Taiwan. An English course was designed to integrate pupils’ listening skills into a content-based course with a series of tourism-related topics. The results showed that the teaching of listening skills could be integrated into the content-based course and certain listening skills were greatly improved. Also, the study has implications for designing a topic-based course for teaching and testing listening skills, as well as for developing listening and speaking abilities in young EFL learners.     

Fostering and Assessing Critical Listening Skills in the Speech Course

In this article we present the results of two listening assessments conducted in spring 2013 and fall 2013. Our primary goal is of a pedagogical nature and is concerned with the design and the testing of a tool that could measure students’ critical listening skill improvement during the span of a semester. A total of N = 370 students participated in two quasi-experimental studies in which we developed a program to foster and measure critical listening skills. Results show that students’ listening skills improved in specific aspects of critical listening at both times. Effects were larger in the second round due to adjustments to both the course curriculum and the assessment tool. Results support the impact of the intervention by modest to high effect sizes and the construct validity of the assessment tool. We consider the improvement that was found in the current study an important beginning and recommend that the practice of listening skills becomes an integral part of the curriculum at the undergraduate level.     

A Broader Understanding of the Ethics of Listening: Philosophy,Cultural Studies,Media Studies and the Ethical Listening Subject

This study investigated the effects of Mozart's high-frequency-rich music and structured oral directions on third graders' auding and reading comprehension performance. The design was pre-post, with a control group and two experimental treatment groups. Mozart Symphonies Nos. 35, 38, 40, and 41, and four Frank Schaffer listening skills books were used with one experimental group. The second experimental group received the listening instruction without music. The control group worked assorted word searches. The Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test (Forms 1 and 2, Primary C) and the Addison-Wesley Sequential Test of Educational Progress (STEP) III (D) Listening Test (Form X) were used to measure reading comprehension and auding respectively. Instruction was administered by regular classroom teachers to intact classes for 30 minute morning periods, three times per week for eight weeks. Analysis of pretest and posttest scores from 63 students reveal that an organized instructional method using Mozart's music and oral directions significantly increases auding and reading comprehension, with music being the key independent variable.     

The Role of Metacognition in the Development of EFL Learners’ Listening Skill

This study investigated the impact of metacognitive instruction on the listening skill, and metacognitive knowledge of a group of male students (N = 30) who were learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in Iran. The study participants spoke Persian as a first language and were high-intermediate EFL learners. The participants received a guided lesson plan in metacognition (planning, monitoring, and evaluation) through a pedagogical cycle approach over a semester (eight weeks). International English Language Testing System listening tests (practice) were used to track the participants’ listening performance. Participants also completed a Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire, which examined their use of metacognitive awareness when engaged in listening tasks. Results indicated that the students improved their listening skill after being taught about metacognition; however, no significant use of metacognitive awareness was reported. This study concludes with a discussion of some potential implications, and provides scope for future research.     

Improving the Performance of the Listening Competency Scale: Revision and Validation

Measuring latent traits is central to quantitative listening research and has been the focus of many studies. One such prominent measurement instrument, based on the Wolvin and Coakley (1993) listening taxonomy, was developed by Ford, Wolvin, and Chung (2000). Subsequent validation research (Mickelson & Welch, 2012)called for revisiting and modifying individual items of the Listening Competency Scale. The research presented here outlines the process of revising the items to create a revised scale with a more unified, affective view of listening behavioral practices through self-report and documents the confirmatory analytic results for the revised scale.     

Defining Social Listening: Recognizing an Emerging Dimension of Listening

Social listening occurs in a variety of mediated contexts, but it has yet to be clearly defined in the realm of communication and listening studies. This report explores social listening as a developing listening type extending from the existing taxonomy of listening, posits a definition of its meaning, evaluates its role in organizational and interpersonal communication, and discusses its value as an additional listening dimension. Based on a review and synthesis of literature across multiple fields of study, we describe social listening as a dimension of listening comprising a blend of purposes complementary to the existing appreciative, comprehensive, critical, discriminative, and therapeutic listening types discussed in Wolvin and Coakley’s (1993) listening taxonomy. As mediated communication continuously evolves within the communication landscape, the urgency to understand social listening will surely increase. With this in mind, we introduce and define social listening as an emerging type of listening and as a means of attaining interpersonal information and social intelligence that can empower relationships and influence the way we listen to and communicate with one another through increasingly popular mediated channels.     

Nonverbal Attentive Behavior and Listening Comprehension

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role nonverbal attending behaviors play in listening skills and Comprehension. Nonverbal attending behaviors of 112 subjects were videotaped while they watched a humorous videotape. Measures of listeners' comprehension were collected on a 14-item multiple-choice questionnaire. One-half of the subjects was given the opportunity to take notes. The data were analyzed by t-tests and a Pearson correlation. Results indicated that those who exhibited more attending behaviors scored higher on the comprehension test than those who did not. The opportunity to take notes did not enhance comprehension scores.     

Assessing Listening in Elementary and Junior High Schools: An Examination of Four Listening Tests

The major object of the Calgary Listening Inquiry Project (CLIP) was the undertaking of school-based studies derived from teacher-defined problems and concerns with listening instruction. Another objective was development, implementation, and assessment of effective strategies and materials for teaching and evaluating listening. Four tests—Listening Comprehension Tests (LCT), Alberta Listening Tests (ALT), Test of Adolescent Language (TOAL), and Thinking Creatively with Sounds and Words (TCSW)—were administered. Discussion concerns the nature of these tests and how the use and study of them helped teachers not only to acquire data about students' listening skills but also to develop a vocabulary about listening and to define their questions. Teachers developed a Listening Profile for use as a student checklist for listening skill development and two Listening Awareness Assessment Questionnaires to obtain student feedback and to involve students as participants in CLIP.     

The research to teaching initiative: infusing faculty research into the MSW curriculum

Social work educators have a responsibility to facilitate student utilization of research‐based knowledge. Tremendous research based knowledge is generated at many schools, but due to multiple responsibilities, faculty often find it difficult to share their findings with fellow faculty outside of their immediate project team, or to inquire into the research efforts of their colleagues within the school. This paper describes the development, implementation and preliminary evaluation of Research to Teaching, an initiative to infuse the curriculum of a school of social work with current research findings from its faculty. The goal of the Research to Teaching initiative is to take current publications from faculty, and distill them into easy‐to‐use lecture materials including slides summarizing the content, teaching notes, discussion questions, and group activities such as skill practice, simulation, and other integrative activities. These lectures are placed on a site within the school's larger website, and are accessible to all faculty, students, alumni, and other interested individuals.     

Co-Shaping Metacognitive Awareness and Developing Listening Comprehension through Process-Based Instruction

This study examined the effect of metacognitive process-based and product-based instruction on enhancing listening comprehension and metacognitive awareness. Two classes of high-beginner English as a foreign language learners were randomly assigned to two groups: product-based (n = 30) process-based (n = 30). Both before and after eight instructional sessions, listening comprehension and metacognitive awareness were measured. Process-based group, then, followed a pedagogical sequence in each session (Vandergrift, 2004), providing opportunities for dialogue about the listening process and the strategies involved, whereas the product-based group was not engaged in dialogue nor did the group reflect upon listening strategies. Results indicated that the process-based group significantly outperformed the product-based one in terms of gains in listening comprehension and metacognitive awareness. Moreover, the microgenetic analysis of the dialogic interactions of the process-based group presented some evidence showing how the students co-shaped metacognitive awareness. This article concludes with discussing the findings, presenting some pedagogical implications, and sketching out areas for further research.     

Relationship between Listening Comprehension Strategy Use and Listening Comprehension Proficiency

This study explores the relationship between students’ listening comprehension strategy use and their listening comprehension proficiency with regard to the group, level, and degree of strategy use. Forty-four university students of an English Language teaching department comprised the study population. Three listening comprehension tests were given to participants with two-week intervals to measure their listening comprehension proficiency. To measure the students’ listening comprehension strategy use, a listening comprehension strategy inventory developed by the researcher was used. Data analysis showed a positive correlation between the level of listening comprehension strategy use and listening comprehension proficiency. When different groups of listening comprehension strategy use of learners were taken into account, there was a statistically significant difference between the students’ listening comprehension achievements in favor of the group with high metacognitive strategy use.     

What Types of Training Improve Learners’ Performances in Second Language Listening Comprehension?

This study investigates the impact of a high-level and a low-level process-based L2 comprehension training on L1 French students’ listening performances. These students (N = 108) of English, Spanish, and German came from five different classes. After a L2 comprehension pretest, the participants were divided into two experimental groups. During the experimental phase, the two groups listened to the same three documents in their respective L2. The first group undertook listening comprehension activities relying on low-level processes, while the second group undertook activities aiming at fostering their use of high-level processes. These second types of activities were based on the Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ) (Vandergrift, Goh, Mareschal & Tafaghodatari, 2006). As hypothesized, less skilled listeners trained to automatize low-level processes, scored significantly higher on the comprehension posttest than on the pretest. However, the hypothesis that more skilled listeners trained to develop high-level listening processes, would score better on the posttest than on the pretest could not be verified. Nevertheless, we observed some tendencies showing that more skilled learners had drawn some benefits from the training. In our conclusion, we argue that the impact of a high-level and a low-level process-based L2 comprehension training strongly depends on learners’ initial levels.     

Boundaried Caring and Gendered Emotion Management in Hospice Work

Caring work, which is premised on caring for and caring about recipients, involves a great deal of emotion management. Feeling rules shape expectations about emotion management and are informally shared through workers’ narratives about quality work. Using qualitative data from hospice workers in the southwestern US, I find that narratives of quality within hospice include emotion‐management skills such as listening, truly caring, keeping calm and maintaining boundaries. Through an analysis of how workers discuss and map skills onto individual women and men co‐workers, this article highlights two gendered patterns. First, even when women and men are thought to share high‐quality skills, the ways these skills are described reinforce naturalistic understandings of gender. Second, men are seen to hold a broad range of emotion‐management skills, but women are not described as holding the most important emotion‐management skill: keeping boundaries. Understanding this differential application of emotion‐management skills helps us to understand how gender and gender inequality are reproduced within caring work.     

Managerial Listening and Career Development in the Hospitality Industry

Recent research confirms that communication skills are essential to effective management practice. Less is known, however, about the specific communication activities associated with different levels of management and how these competencies affect career development. This paper reports findings from two related studies of hospitality managers. One reports the differences between middle and upper level managers' perceptions of the frequency and difficulty of specific communication activities. The second study examines upper level managers' perceptions of the communication skills most essential to their career development.

Findings suggest that listening is perceived to be more critical to managerial effectiveness as individuals move into senior level positions, and that listening is perceived by general managers as the most essential communication skill for their career development. The results of this research have implications for educators, practitioners, and consultants as they work to improve managers' communication competence.