ESL students in academic listening/speaking courses often listen to long audio recordings similar to a lecture or other academic passages. When listening to these passages, students can lose their interest which impedes their learning of new strategies for understanding academic language. Students in the Level Four Listening/Speaking classes at Brigham Young University's English Language Center (ELC), under the previous curriculum, would experience this challenge. All of the passages were available only in audio and were long in duration. The students would lose interest and improve little in their listening skills. Under the new curriculum at the ELC, students in Academic Levels A and B practice listening using both audio and video. When only audio recordings are used, the students are observed to lose interest and they do not practice the strategies. In order to build student interest, broadcast news video clips can be used. These clips offer a multi-sensory experience for the students and they can vary in length. Also, these clips expose the students to language and content that they will experience in university settings, thus providing them with an authentic experience. In order to create cohesive and coherent materials using video clips, specifications for these materials needed to be designed and developed. The designed specifications discuss ten steps for developers to follow in order to create these materials. As a part of these specifications, two sample sections were created. Because of the context, the specifications focus on the use of broadcast news clips; however, they can easily be adapted for use in other contexts as well. The developed sample sections were piloted in order to assess the usefulness of the specifications. Feedback was received from my Project Chair, the listening/speaking coordinator, the students who participated in the pilot, and the other teacher who participated in the pilot. Using the feedback revisions were made to the specifications and the sample sections.

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Recent research on the neuropsychology of emotion and pain has indicated that emotion and pain are complex processes that may substantially influence each other. Disorders of negative emotion and pain are known to co-occur (Delgado, 2004); however, it is not clear whether negative emotional conditions lead to pain or whether increased pain experiences lead to negative emotion. Further, certain negative emotions, such as hostility or anger, may produce differential effects on the experience of pain, such that they may lead to an increase in pain or a decrease in pain. An increase or decrease in pain perception may lead to altered behavioral, cognitive, and neuropsychological effects in high hostility. In order to more clearly examine the aforementioned relationships, the current experiment examined auditory emotion perception before and after cold pressor pain in high and low hostile men. Additionally, quantitative electroencephalography (QEEG) was used to measure changes in cerebral activation as a result of auditory emotion perception and cold pressor pain. Results indicated that identification of emotion post-cold pressor differed as a function of hostility level and ear. The high hostile group increased identification of stimuli at the right ear after cold pressor exposure, while the low hostile group increased identification of stimuli at the left ear after cold pressor exposure. Primary QEEG findings indicated increased left temporal activation after cold pressor exposure and increased reactivity to cold pressor pain in the high hostile group. Low hostile men had a bilateral increase in high beta magnitude at the temporal lobes and a bilateral increase in delta magnitude at the frontal lobes after the cold pressor. Results suggest decreased cerebral laterality and left hemisphere activation for emotional and pain processing in high hostile men. / Ph. D.