Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University

"The purpose of this study is to investigate the importance of listening as a skill of learning which needs guiding; to locate the place it should fill in the elementary school curriculum; and to examine how the teacher may best include its instruction in his regular classroom teaching situations"--Introduction. / Typescript. / "August, 1960." / "Submitted to the Graduate School of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Advisor: Marian W. Black, Professor Directing Paper. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 30-32).

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2003. / Advisor: Dr. Marcella D. Genz, Florida State University, School of Information Studies. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Oct. 7, 2003). Includes bibliographical references.

In recent years, there has been a growing body of literature investigating metacognition in second language (L2) listening (e.g. Cross, 2010; Vandergrift & Goh, 2012; Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari, 2010). The theoretical underpinning of the majority of these studies is that metacognition and listening are individual psychological processes. This led to a limited understanding of metacognition in listening that highlights the regulation of oneself, whilst disregarding the communication partner and the wider context. The present study contributed to the existing body of literature by investigating and re-conceptualising metacognition in L2 listening. Informed by a sociocultural and dialogical perspective on discourse and thought, this thesis offered new insights that recognise L2 listeners’ metacognitive awareness and activities as reciprocal monitoring and control processes. International students for whom English was a second/foreign language participated in the study. They worked in pairs on a collaborative problem-solving task and their interactions on this task were video-recorded. Directly after the task, individual interviews with each member of the pair were conducted to gain their accounts of how they perceived the task and how they monitored and regulated the interaction. A grounded theory informed approach was used to analyse the interview data, and a conversation analysis informed approach was used to analyse the interaction data. The findings of this study have established that a wider view of metacognition in L2 listening is required. The re-conceptualisation, underpinned by existing theories and deriving from the study’s empirical data, moved beyond conventional views of metacognition, and argued that the monitoring and control processes in listening are dialogical and reciprocal. This re-conceptualisation was encapsulated in the term Metacognitive Discourse Awareness (MDA). The central tenet of the MDA framework is that metacognition in listening involves the complex regulation of the discourse, thought and social-affective dimensions. This multidimensional framing of MDA entails the listener’s awareness of his/herself as the co-regulator of the other(s) in the reciprocal relationship in which meaning is socially co-constructed and negotiated. This study thus foregrounded the situatedness of the monitoring and control processes in L2 listening and the connections within, between and across the thought, discourse and social-affective dimensions. The thesis concluded with recommendations for L2 teachers and learners to develop a broader understanding of metacognition in the listening process so that this understanding can have an impact on practices in the increasingly diverse global higher education context.

This study aimed to explore Chinese and Korean EFL learners? perceptions with regards to the use of listening strategies. The purpose is to learn whether Chinese and Korean students achieve academic listening comprehension through specific listening strategies. The data were collected from first and second year students currently studying abroad in the US. Although they are immersed in an English speaking environment, the use of listening strategies still affects their development of academic listening comprehension based on what they have learned in their home countries. For this reason, this study provides a corpus for understanding Chinese and Korean EFL students' listening behavior and what constrains their English listening comprehension. The research design is one hundred and sixty-six college level students from three public universities in Texas who completed web-based questionnaires. Skilled and less-skilled groups were differentiated according to their TOEFL listening scores. If the student had a score of more than 570, he/she was categorized into the skilled listeners group; below 570, they belonged to the less-skilled listeners group. In terms of the need for additional research on the different factors that affect developmental outcomes in L2 listening comprehension, the following research questions were investigated: 1) Is there a statistically significant relationship between the self-reported use of listening strategies and self-reported listening comprehension scores on the TOEFL? 2) Is there a difference between skilled and less-skilled non-native English speakers in the self-reported use of four categories of listening strategies (memory, cognitive, meta-cognitive, and socio-affective)? 3) What factors influence the use of self-reported listening strategies? The findings show that students in this sample tended to employ memory strategies as a means of achieving listening comprehension. In theory, cognitive and metacognitive strategies are more difficult than memory strategies, prompting a lack of sophisticated strategies for Chinese and Korean students. In addition, students? listening skills are not mature. The pedagogical implications of this study for EFL education are that teachers, while teaching listening, should be alert to spot such phenomena and, specifically, instruct students to reach listening maturity via cognitive and metacognitive strategies.

Purpose: To investigate the effects of vocabulary, working memory, age, semantic context, and signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) on speech recognition in adverse conditions (multitalker babble) in normal-hearing listeners aged 18-35. First, a general hypothesis was tested that listeners with larger receptive vocabularies would be more accurate at recognising speech in noise than listeners with more limited receptive vocabularies, even when target stimuli are words with high lexical frequency. A second more specific hypothesis was that the vocabulary would be predictive of speech recognition accuracy when the signal was moderately degraded, but not mildly or severely degraded. Method: 80 sentences with a high (HP) or low (LP) degree of semantic predictability (40 HP and 40 LP) were recorded from a male speaker of NZ English. These sentences were used as experimental target stimuli, and presented in multitalker babble at four SNRs: -8, -4, 0 and 4 dB SNR. Thirty-five participants (11 males and 24 females, aged 18 to 35), with puretone hearing thresholds of 15 dB HL or better, completed the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) vocabulary subtest, the WAIS working memory subtests, and the experimental listening task in which they were required to repeat back the target sentences. Results: There was considerable variability between listeners in speech recognition performance, in terms of percent words accurately recognised overall (M = 45.8%; SD = 7.4) and for both HP (M = 54.4%; SD = 9.8) and LP (M = 35%; SD = 8.9) conditions. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that receptive (PPVT) and productive (WAIS) vocabulary knowledge, but not working memory, contributed 8 significant variance to listeners’ speech recognition scores overall and in both the HP and LP conditions. Further regression analyses at individual SNR levels showed that receptive vocabulary contributed significant variance to listening recognition scores in all predictability and SNR conditions except the most favourable (HP stimuli at 4 dB SNR) and least favourable (LP stimuli at -8 dB SNR) listening conditions. Working memory and age were not significantly related to overall listening score, HP listening score, or LP listening score, but age did contribute significant variance in the - 4dB SNR LP condition. Conclusion: The results provide further evidence that greater vocabulary knowledge is associated with improved speech recognition in adverse conditions. This effect was salient in mid-range adverse listening conditions, but was not apparent in highly favourable and extremely poor listening conditions. The results were interpreted to suggest that in moderately adverse listening conditions listeners with larger lexicons may be better able to exploit redundancies and/or intelligible ‘glimpses’ in the speech signal.

Thesis (M. Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1993.

Thesis (M.Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1993. / Also available in print.

The purpose of the present study was to compare the number of perseverations on fused (no delay) versus unfused (0.5 msec delay) CV-DL tasks with measures on a battery of executive functions across three groups: Schizophrenics (SCZ), Manic-Depressives (MD), and normal controls (NC).