The Earwitness endeavours to explore the sonic qualities of the city, the spaces that sounds occupy and possibilities of how these spaces can be inhabited. The ability of sound to travel around corners and through walls led to a process of urban exploration within the Pretoria Central Business District that identified a diverse range of ‘inbetween’ spaces that are not traditionally seen as inhabitable. The diversity of these spaces led to the development of an architectural strategy based upon the chair as a spatial device. Its ability to be interpreted on an individual level and employed in the widest range of scenarios makes the chair an ideal candidate to respond to the unique acoustic qualities of the spaces identified. The chair is thus seen as the earwitness to the acoustic qualities of the city and, through a process of transformation and mutation, begins to respond spatially to the personalities of the spaces encountered, taking on mythical personalities of its own. Through occupying the inbetween spaces of the city block, the chairs become a subversive inhabitant of the city – locating spaces that can be listened to. The investigation of the chair as a spatial device is grounded within a sonic festival scenario for the city of Pretoria that aims to re-establish the relationship between the user, sound and the spaces of the city. The festival is operated from a proposed infill typology that completes a more traditionally architectural element to the thesis, whilst maintaining the initial conceptual integrity of the exploration. The process of critical investigation and exploration followed in the thesis aims to reveal methods with which architectural-acoustic installations can promote user engagement with, and awareness, of the city. The Earwitness thus explores the fictions and fragments inherent in the experience of the city through probing the effects of audio culture and architecture. It hosts a set of curious confrontations between the field of the real and imaginary through a collection of quasi-cultural artefacts. These artefacts range from object to installation to event and engage the auditory aspects of the city – questioning the role of design in an immersive world in which freak mutations and mistakes are the norm, perhaps even the key, to success. Copyright / Dissertation (MInt(Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Architecture / unrestricted

This study addresses the question of the necessity of propositional content in children's comprehension of speech acts. In investigating this aspect of communicative competence in children the study considered the relative importance of age (3, 4), context (Requests, Questions, and Offers), and quantity of propositional content. Two factorial experiments were conducted in which 54 three and four-year-old children were administered a discrimination task, where, through puppet play, contexts were constructed for utterances in order to simulate particular speech acts. Judgments of the illocutionary force of such contexts were elicited by having children decide which one of two paraphrased utterances matched the stimulus utterance. Quantity of linguistic information in the stimulus presentations was progressively reduced. While younger children's performance was relatively unaffected by the reduction of linguistic information, the older children's discrimination of speech acts was relatively adversely affected. These findings were supported by additional data from an elicited imitation task and spontaneous responses. A developmental shift is proposed, from more direct context-dependent strategies of speech act processing to a later more linear or text-dependent approach linked to developing linguistic awareness. / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

Background Social media has increased tremendously in users during the last years, which consequently has transformed the way people create, collaborate and communicate information. Given the wide usage, the opportunity for businesses to listen and analyze consumers' opinions online has increased. The technique of analyzing user-generated content from various social media channels is a tactic where companies can utilize their capacity and improve future business. Social listening is an active process where companies can attend, observe, interpret and respond to a variety of stimuli created by consumers on social media platforms.   Purpose The purpose of this research is to understand how organizations manage social listening and how the activities in the process can be implemented to leverage impacts for organizations’ marketing strategies. The purpose is refined by addressing the research questions:      -       How do organizations manage the social listening process?   -       How can the activities in the social listening process be implemented to enhance the leverage of impacts on the organization’s marketing strategy? Method To carry out the research purpose, a qualitative research through a descriptive multiple case study design was performed. Empirical data was collected through eight semi-structured interviews with professionals within the field. The primary data was reviewed in relation to previously conducted research by thematic analysis to answer the research questions.   Conclusion              The research finds that organizations’ intention of integrating social listening is to deepen the understanding of the market to incorporate the results in their marketing strategy. Empirical findings explain the social listening process by emphasizing on the importance of establishing intentions to facilitate the choice of process, separating qualitative and quantitative data, and to carefully chosen dissemination strategy, to leverage the impacts on marketing strategies as a result of social listening.

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Today, a countless number of untrained and volunteer English as a second or foreign language teachers are working throughout the world to help meet the rising need for English teachers. Many of these volunteers have little or no training in teaching English. However, Basic Training and Resources for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (BTRTESOL) is a book and website that can be used as both a teacher-training program and a self-learning resource to help prepare these volunteer teachers. The idea for this program started with Dr. Lynn Henrichsen, who later invited a team of graduate students at Brigham Young University to work with him. This report documents the developmental process of two BTRTESOL units, namely, Unit 6A, "Developing English Language Learners' Listening Skills" and Unit 6B, "Developing English Language Learners' Speaking Skills." Both of these BTRTESOL units were designed to, first, familiarize novice and volunteer teachers with what it takes to listen and speak in a second language so that these teachers can identify the needs of their students successfully and plan and teach effectively. In addition, Unit 6A identifies several factors that make the second language listening process challenging. Unit 6B, on the other hand, describes four important characteristics of successful speaking activities. Finally, some of the most commonly used listening and speaking activities are recommended for novice and volunteer teachers to use with all levels of students. Additional resources, both print and electronic, are included at the end of each unit to help users learn more about each subject area and get additional teaching ideas.

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Contemporary definitions of human listening suggest that it is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. Short-term and interpretative listening may be viewed as important aspects of the listening process. However, research in time-compressed speech has focused on listening comprehension while not adequately treating other important types of listening. A broader view of the listening process would include all of the skills considered relevant to everyday human communication. This study examined the effect of time-compressed speech on comprehensive, interpretative and short-term listening. The Kentucky Comprehensive Listening Test was used to measure the three types of listening. Cut and splice tape editing was employed in the development of four master test tapes: a control tape presented at normal rate and tapes with test stimuli time-compressed by 30%, 45%, and 60%. Each of four randomly selected groups, 120 total subjects, was exposed to one of the four test tapes. The data from the test administrations was analyzed by analysis-of-variance and simple means tests. Results indicate that a statistically significant amount of the variance in comprehensive, interpretative and short-term listening scores may be explained by the manipulated variable, time-compression. However, the amount of variance-accounted-for is relatively low for both short-term and interpretative listening. Closer examination of the data indicates that short-term and interpretative listening test scores do not significantly decay until a high level of time-compression (60%) is reached. Conversely, in the case of comprehensive listening, a relatively linear relation exists between degree of time-compression and test scores. Significant drops in mean scores were found at more moderate levels of time-compression. The findings are discussed in light of differences between short-term and long-term memory. Comprehensive listening, which relies upon long-term memory, may suffer from a lack of adequate processing and encoding time which may be induced by time-compression. Short-term and Interpretative listening are processes which rely primarily on short-term memory and may not be adversely affected until a level of time-compression is reached which impairs intelligibility. Implications are noted for future research and for educational applications.

Listening is one of the key skills needed to be proficient in a second language (L2). Some L2 teachers support the development of L2 learners' listening skills by providing input in a different sensory mode (e.g., reading). Nevertheless, developing L2 listening skills using more than one sensory mode, may lead to cognitive overload. In order to provide effective L2 listening instruction, teachers need to know what learning strategies will help students improve their listening skills. This quasi-experimental study examined the benefits of reading a text while listening to it and the effect that reading-while-listening (RWL) has on an L2 learner's listening comprehension. The study was done with intermediate-level, English as a Second Language (ESL) students in two pre-existing classes at the English Language Center (ELC) in Provo, Utah, with one class using a teaching method that included reading and listening together and one class that did no reading, just listening. The results of this study showed that both the control group and treatment group significantly improved their listening comprehension skills over the course of 14 weeks. For the treatment group which had used RWL, however, their listening scores were not significantly different from those of the control group. The pedagogical implications of the findings for second language teachers teaching listening skills are also discussed.