Thesis (MTech (Education))--Peninsula Technikon, Cape Town, 2003 / Using a case study approach, this thesis describes the listening practices of tirst year students at a technikon in the Western Cape. The research was conducted over a period of two years, from 2002 - 2003. Research data are gleaned from an analysis and interpretation ofresponses from several ethnographic tools: questionnaires (completed by lecturers and students), notes on class observations, oral interviews and audio-visual samples ofstudents' gestures and actions in class. Oral and written lecture recall assessments are analysed and interpreted with a view to describing students' listening practices. Six first year students, whose home languages are Xhosa and Afrikaans, are selected for research. The impact oftheir listening and learning through the medium ofEnglish is considered, as well as the influence ofchange in a learning culture, socio-cultural and socio-economic factors. Their life stories are analysed in depth to consider how factors in their lives influence their listening in class. Pairs ofselected students are compared to try to identify the qualities ofeffective listeners. The impact oflistening on these students' academic performance is examined and the role ofeducators as facilitators is considered. It is concluded that both students and staffhave a role to play in improving students' listening and English proficiency in order to promote academic success.

Listening, as a communication skill, is an essential factor in the normal language development of the' child. Until recently, however, there has been very little research conducted concerning the linguistic parameters that influence the ability to listen. Thus, this investigation was designed to study the effects of two linguistic parameters, construction and semantic constraints on the verbal responses of preschool children in a dichotic listening task. Fifteen children, between the ages of 5-3 to 6-8, were presented with four dichotic listening tasks consisting of 80 stimuli, (40 sentences and 40 pseudo-sentences). The children were asked to report the message delivered to their right ear. The performance of the children was analyzed according to the F-Test and the Test of Least Significant Difference. The results showed that construction errors were the only statistically significant errors (P < .05) among the six types of error types counted in the listening tasks. There were fewer construction errors made when there was a meaningful message to report than when there was a non-meaningful one. Although the semantic parameters were not statistically significant in this study, other investigations have demonstrated their influence on the report of subjects in a dichotic listening task. Therefore, a future research project should be conducted placing a greater emphasis on the semantic parameters. Additionally, a three level listening hierarchy was found. It was based upon the number of construction errors that occurred among the four dichotic listening tasks. This writer feels that future research should pursue the question of an existing hierarchy among dichotic listening tasks. Such an investigation, however, should utilize a larger population than the population tested in this study.