Book Summary: New Ways in Teaching With Humor explores the whole gamut of possibilities for using humor in English language teaching. Find ideas for beginning to advanced students, 5-minute activities to start a class on a humorous note to multiday projects, and silly English puns and jokes to activities for examining controversial social issues. Topics covered include: Humor and Language Development; Wordplay and Puns; Comics and Cartoons; Jokes and Joke Telling; Sitcoms and Movies; Internet Resources and Digital Literacy; and Parody, Satire, and Sarcasm. What all these lessons have in common is that they all use humor to enhance the English learning experience and provide English language learners with the linguistic and cultural knowledge they need to become more proficient users of the language. New Ways in Teaching With Humor not only shows the how of using humor in the English language classroom, but also the why.

Book Summary: New Ways in Teaching With Music shows how music can be incorporated into your lessons as a way to decrease anxiety, increase motivation and retention, and invigorate both students and teachers. This book is a collection of adaptable lessons that use music as a catalyst for effective, engaging, and enjoyable language learning. 101 activities for students of all skill levels and a companion website with online resources are included. The lessons are broken down by topic including: Reading, Writing, Listening, Speaking, Grammar, Vocabulary, Cultural Exploration, Integrated Skills

As listening to podcasts have increased in most western countries, podcast applications need to become more exciting both content-wise, functionally, and visually as well as contain original features, to differentiate them-selves from the competition. One such feature is data visualization, which is in this study argued to deliver additional value for users. This design study investigated the possibility of visually representing personal listening history from podcasts into a mobile application through focusing on the following question: How can visualization of podcast listening history give additional value to the user-experience on a mobile screen? Research on visualization of temporal data and user experience was used as the foundational theory, with additional information from state-of-the-art products. Using a variant of the design process, described in Design Study Methodology, a final design was developed iteratively, with focus groups and usability tests. After designing and implementing a proposed solution, usability tests were conducted remotely, using videos of a hi-fidelity prototype. Concluding the research, one finding is that a successful data visualization of podcast listening history on mobile screens should include only meaningful animations and interactions and separation between visual elements and filtering options. To fully understand the best implementation strategy, more refined and expansive studies are required, with more test participants. User tests in this study were limited due to the Covid-19 outbreak. / Då podcastlyssnandet har ökat i västvärlden behöver podcastmobilapplikationer differentiera sig mot konkurrensen genom att erbjuda ett spännande utbud av podcasts och unika funktionaliteter. I denna studie anses visualisering vara en sådan funktionalitet. Visualisering anses även kunna bidra med ytterligare uppskattning för användaren. Denna designstudie ämnar studera den visuella representationen av lyssningshistorik från podcasts i en mobilapplikation, genom att besvara följande forskningsfråga: Hur kan visualisering av lyssningshistorik från podcasts ge ytterligare värde för användarupplevelsen i en mobilapplikation? Den grundläggande teorin bakom studien består av tidigare forskning om visualisering av tidsrelaterade data samt information från moderna digitala produkter från relevanta ämnen. En slutgiltig design togs iterativt fram med hjälp av en variant av metodiken från Design Study Methodology, som bestod utav fokusgrupper och användarstudier, bland annat. Efter design och implementation av en prototyp undersöktes den med användarstudier. Dessa var gjorda på distans med hjälp utav videoklipp av olika funktionaliteter i prototypen. Resultat från studien visar på att en lyckad datavisualisering av lyssningshistorik från podcasts i mobilapplikationer bör endast inkludera meningsfulla animationer och interaktioner, samt bör man separera visuella komponenter med filtreringsalternativ. En mer expansiv och noga planerad studie med fler testdeltagare behövs för att säkerställa den bästa strategin för en lyckad implementering av de föreslagna visuella metoder som ingick i prototypen. Användarstudien som genomfördes begränsades av Covid-19 pandemin.

The concept of attention is complex and multifaceted and can be approached from many perspectives. One such perspective is of attention as a limited pool of resources. Kahneman’s (1973) model of limited capacity provides a basis for understanding constraints on attention, including the costs of divided attention. In the same vein as Kahneman’s model, the Framework for Understanding Effortful Listening (FUEL; Pichora-Fuller et al., 2016) applies the concept of limited attentional capacity to the demands of listening in a variety of contexts. The current work examines novel combinations of the methods commonly used in the field of Cognitive Hearing Science to address questions about the nature of attention allocation when listening in noise and under the constraints of divided attention. I first combined listening in noise with a secondary continuous working memory task and measured pupillary response as an index of cognitive work and listening effort. Here, I found that listening task demands affect performance on the working memory task. The shared demands of listening and working memory were not, however, evident in the pupil dilation patterns. As a result, I followed these findings by employing a different divided attention method. With the use of a temporally discrete secondary task that either closely overlapped with the listening task or did not closely overlap, I found the same carryover effects of listening demands on secondary task. Most importantly, I found that these demands interacted and were clearly present in the pupil dilation patterns, demonstrating the importance of the timing of the task demands. Together, the studies in this thesis provide evidence that these two secondary tasks access the same attentional resources as those accessed in the primary listening task and that this overlapping demand for resources can be seen in the pupillary response. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Listening to speech in a noisy environment is a cognitively difficult and effortful task. Attending to more than one task at a time is similarly demanding and effortful. These two kinds of tasks are assumed to use the same limited pool of cognitive resources that we have available to us. This thesis combines listening in noise with divided attention tasks to demonstrate this overlap in demands for cognitive resources using novel combinations of these kinds of tasks. Additionally, this thesis uses the pupillary response—a well-studied index of cognitive effort—to further examine the nature of these overlapping task demands. These studies found that the demands of these tasks do, in fact, overlap, and contribute evidence to the current literature supporting the underlying assumption that these two tasks, and the pupillary response as a measure of effort, are accessing the same pool of limited resources.

A multielement brief experimental analysis was used to improve and extend previous research to compare the impact of listening while reading while following along (LWFA) and listening while reading while not following along (LWNFA) interventions on oral reading comprehension rate (ORCR), reading comprehension levels, and reading fluency in students with reading disabilities. The collected data for each of the eight middle school and junior high special education students who were participants in this study included: (a) words read correct per minute (WPM), (b) errors per minute (EPM), (c) comprehension questions answered correct per passage, and (d) ORCR. The students ranged from 11 to 14 years of age and 7 of the students were male and 1 was female. Student?s standard intelligence scores, as obtained from student records of formal assessment for eligibility for special education services, ranged from 66-116. All students were functioning at the fourth grade instructional level. Analysis by individual suggest that both listening while reading treatment conditions enhanced oral reading comprehension rates, reading comprehension levels, and increased reading fluency as compared to the control condition. Students displayed higher ORCR, total comprehension questions answered correctly, answered more factual questions correctly, and WPM under LWFA as compared to LWNFA and the control conditions. However, fewer EPM were reported overall for the LWNFA and higher reading comprehension inference questions answered correctly were also observed. Statistically significant differences were noted in reading fluency measures such that more words were read under LWFA as compared to the control condition and fewer errors were reported under LWFA as compared to the control condition. Methodological limitations associated with te current study,individual student performance difference and procedures for using ORCR are described.

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