Cette thèse est centrée sur l'évaluation des capacités de lecture et reliées à la lecture des collégiens normo-lecteurs français. Le premier objectif est d'identifier les capacités engagées dans la compréhension écrite. Dans les premiers grades (6 et 7), les capacités de compréhension écrite sont surtout expliquées par celles de compréhension orale, de conscience morphologique et de lecture de mots irréguliers, mais pas par la lecture de pseudomots, quelle que soit la mesure (précision ou temps). Ce dernier résultat se retrouve dans les grades supérieurs (8 et 9) dans lesquels la lecture de mots irréguliers n'a plus d'incidence sur la compréhension écrite. Le second objectif est d'élaborer un outil diagnostique des capacités de lecture, et des capacités reliées, chez les collégiens (6 à 9). L'examen des capacités d'identifications des mots écrits montre que les effets de régularité et de lexicalité sont significatifs, quelle que soit la mesure, et le niveau scolaire. Les effets de longueur varient selon la lexicalité: quel que soit le niveau scolaire, les pseudomots longs sont lus moins précisément et moins rapidement que les courts alors que les mots irréguliers longs ne sont jamais pénalisés. Le niveau de lecture (mesuré à l'aide d'un test Français de référence) est déterminé surtout par les capacités de lecture de pseudomots, et également par celles de conscience phonémique mais uniquement lorsque les temps sont pris en compte. La construction cohérente de l'outil est vérifiée à l'aide d'une classification hiérarchique de variables. L'ensemble des résultats souligne l'importance de considérer pour toutes évaluations les temps de traitement en plus de la précision. / The aim of this thesis was to evaluate the reading and reading-related skills of French middle school students (Grades 6 to 9). The first objective was to identify the capacity involved in reading comprehension at the middle school level. In the first grades (Grades 6 and 7), the results show that reading comprehension skills are largely predicted by listening comprehension, morphological awareness, and irregular word reading, but not pseudoword reading skills, whatever the measure (accuracy or time). This latter result is found in the higher grades (Grades 8 and 9) in which irregular word reading has no impact on reading comprehension, again regardless of the measure. The second objective was to develop a diagnostic evaluation tool for word-level reading and reading-related skills in middle school students. The examination of word-level reading skills at middle school showed significant effects of both regularity and lexicality, whatever the measure and independently of grade. The effect of length depends on lexicality: long pseudowords are read less accurately and more slowly than short ones, whereas long irregular words are read as well as short ones. Reading level (assessed by a French "gold standard" test) is mainly predicted by pseudoword reading skills, and also by phonemic awareness, for response times. The consistent structure (validity) of the tool is verified using a new statistical method: hierarchical classification of variables. The overall results underline the importance of considering response times in addition to accuracy in all assessments.

My identity as a white woman ESL teacher has been structured partly through movies I saw in my youth. More recently in the late 1990s, a film with ESL, The King and I (1956), was on Japanese television two years in a row while I was teaching there. I found that very interesting and began asking questions regarding the influences that popular film may have on real ESL teachers and students. The study questions how films contribute to ESL in terms of teacher and student identities and desires. To explore this question, I collected three forms of data: 24 films with ESL; post-secondary ESL teacher and student responses to watching two films with ESL; and memories of films from my youth. A framework of critical and feminist pedagogy, including work in identity and ESL, and postcolonial, cultural, and feminist studies informed the analysis. I analyzed the data in relation to discourses of desire and the body as a socially constructed site of racial and gender identification. From the film data, I made the case that particular tropes, initiations, and signs construct reel ESL, such as white female teachers as upholders of particular colonial identities. From the teacher and student data, I found that readers engage with cinematic meanings in a space of liminality, that is, not quite in the movie but not quite in themselves. Readers by-pass their race, gender, age, and occupation to access the cinematic body as politically engaged and disrupting the status quo. From the memory data, I argued that through the seemingly innocent practice of watching movies, a world of racialized and gendered desire was settling in and making itself comfortable. The study is positioned in a critical feminist pedagogy of multiliteracies. Here, diverse sites of meaning-making strengthen and disrupt the desires and identities of ESL. / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

Högläsning är ett pedagogiskt verktyg med fördelar gällande såväl möten med olika texter som utvecklande av språkförståelsen. Traditionellt sker högläsning genom att någon läser högt för en grupp eller individ. Ljudböcker anses ha liknande fördelar som traditionell högläsning men det saknas forskning med elevresultat som stödjer antagandet. Avsaknaden av jämförelser mellan olika högläsningsmetoder blev grunden till studiens problemformulering.  Syftet med den här studien är av den anledningen att bidra med kunskap om hur olika fall av högläsning kan påverka elevers hörförståelse. Studien har genomförts med kombination av både kvantitativ och kvalitativ metod genom en undersökning som beskrivs som en interventionsstudie. Studien utgår från framtagna hypoteser och fokuserar på den individuella uppfattningen, därför har den kognitiva teorin använts i analyserna. Materialet har samlats in genom enkäter som elever i åldrarna 8–10 har fått svara på efter att de lyssnat på en berättelse.  I resultatöversikten framgår att de elever som lyssnat på digital högläsning med inlevelse har svarat bättre än de andra grupperna. I de enskilda frågorna är resultaten varierande och bidrar inte med någon definitiv slutsats. Studien bidrar dock med indikationer som både styrker den tidigare forskningen och ger bidrag till professionen genom att öppna upp för diskussioner om högläsningsmetoder och vilka fördelar som finns med de olika metoderna. / Reading aloud is a pedagogical tool with advantages regarding interaction with different text types as well as language development. Traditionally, reading aloud refers to someone reading aloud to a group or individual. Audiobooks are considered to have similar benefits as traditional reading aloud, but there is a lack of research on student results to support that assumption. The lack of comparisons between different reading aloud methods became the basis for this study’s focus.  Therefore, this study aims to contribute with knowledge about how different reading aloud methods can affect students listening comprehension. The study is a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods and is described as an intervention study. The study is based on hypotheses and its focus rests on the individual perception, therefore, the cognitive theory is used in the analysis. The material has been collected through surveys that students aged 8-10 answered after listening to a story.  The overall results indicate that audiobooks have the most positive impact on student’s comprehension. The results do not contribute to a definitive conclusion but it contributes with implications that both strengthen previous research and provide a contribution to the profession by opening up for discussions about reading aloud methods and their benefits.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The goal of this thesis was to create a model of how video-taped law lectures (authentic materials) can be used in designing individual lessons which will, in general, incorporate current EAP practices and standards in aiding the LL.M. students to improve their lecture listening comprehension skills. More specifically, my model will show how within each lesson the video-taped law lectures can be used to target either a particular linguistic form or lecture construct feature for which studies have shown to be problematic in L2 lecture comprehension. Moreover, this model will further demonstrate how these lessons should address lecture organization specific to the study of law, as well as show how general lecture listening strategies can be presented as an integral part of every lesson.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The role of the nurse has changed dramatically in the past twenty years with increasing complexity of patient care and a rapidly changing health care environment. In addition to the challenges noted regarding patient care, problems with increasing medical errors were noted in the literature specific to graduates in their first year as a nurse. Research in particular to nursing education provides a way for nurse educators to become more astute at addressing problems pervading the role of the new nursing graduate. Narrative Pedagogy was identified as a research-based nursing pedagogy and has been researched and enacted for more than a decade. Out of the Narrative Pedagogy research, the Concernful Practices emerged identifying what was considered meaningful to nursing education by teachers, students, and clinicians. Listening was one of the Concernful Practices and became the focus of this study. The research question addressed the “How do nurse educators who enable Narrative Pedagogy experience Listening: knowing and connecting?” This was a hermeneutic phenomenological study in which ten nurse educators shared their experiences. The two themes that emerged from the study included: Listening as Dialogue and Listening as Attunement. The findings of this study provided a different way of thinking about teaching and learning that encompasses so much more than merely a strategy or outcome-based approach. The implications of this study offer nurse educators insight about opening a dialogue that draws attention to the realities of the role of the nurse responding to multiple patients with complex health conditions.

No description available.

Listening comprehension has been the forgotten skill in second language acquisition. However, in recent years, more and more studies have focused on listening comprehension and now acknowledge its importance in language acquisition. Empirical studies have explored how listeners use the two main listening processes (top-down processing and bottom-up processing). In this study, 31 low-proficiency level Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) learners from Brigham Young University took the Chinese Computer Adaptive Language Test (CCALT) and listened to four listening passages, measured by idea unit analysis and local and global question types. The data from these measurements suggest that low-proficiency level CFL participants in this study used both top-down and bottom-up processing while they listened to short listening passages. The results suggest listening comprehension at various proficiency levels needs to be studied further in Chinese and with different types of listening passages.

Listening has proved to be a difficult skill to teach in the language classroom. Research has shown that pre-listening activities, or those activities done with students prior to listening, can have an effect on listening comprehension outcomes. This research addressed the effectiveness of two types of pre-listening activities: top-down and bottom-up. Volunteers from intermediate level courses taught at Brigham Young University were divided into two treatment groups and a control group. The treatment groups followed a mixed models design by each going through a top-down and bottom-up pre-listening activity, followed by listening to a passage in Mandarin Chinese and taking a multiple-choice test. The bottom-up activity chosen for this research was a vocabulary preview activity, with an advance organizer being chosen for the top-down activity. Results showed both treatment groups significantly outperformed the control group for both the top-down and bottom-up activities (p=0.0123 and p=0.0181 respectively). No significant difference existed in scores between top-down and bottom-up activities (p=0.9456). It was determined that both the vocabulary activity and the advance organizer helped to increase the listening comprehension of intermediate level students of Mandarin Chinese.

本研究旨在探討不同聽力教學法對台灣國小學童聽力表現之影響，並試圖了解國小學童處理聽力之過程。本研究將七十六位國小五年級學童，其中包括五十二位男性與二十四位女性，分為「自下而上教學(bottom-up)」與「相互作用教學(interactive)」兩組，進行十五週之聽力教學。學童於聽力教學前後，均以劍橋兒童英檢初級(Starter Level)之聽力測驗進行前測與後測；同時，學童於每週聽力教學後，均須完成一份聽力小考，共計十五份。受試學童之前測、後測與十五次聽力小考皆以統計計量法加以計算，作為探討兩種聽力教學法成效之依據。此外，後測結束後，「相互作用教學(interactive)」組之學童接受問卷調查，以了解國小學童處理聽力之過程。 本研究主要發現「自下而上教學(bottom-up)」與「相互作用教學(interactive)」兩組之聽力表現並無重大差異。但整體而言，「相互作用教學(interactive)」組之平均分數較優於「自下而上教學(bottom-up)」組。問卷結果顯示，受訪之國小學童較常使用「由上而下」之訊息處理方式(top-down processing)，但大多數之受訪者表示，了解每一個單字的意義是聽力理解之關鍵因素。本研究最後提出若干相關建議以供參考。 / The purposes of this study were to identify effective teaching activities that improve elementary EFL students’ listening comprehension and to investigate when learners rely on top-down processing, bottom-up processing, and interactive processing. Participants in this study were 76 fifth graders from two classes in an elementary private school in Taipei County, including 52 males and 24 females. One of the two classes was treated with bottom-up pre-listening activities, while the other class was treated with interactive pre-listening activities. A pre-test and a post-test, adopted from the Starter level in the Cambridge Young Learners’ English Test, were implemented before and after a 15-week listening instruction. During the 15-week listening teaching, participants were also required to take a listening quiz after each session of teaching. Scores of the pre-test, post-test and the 15 listening quizzes were calculated by employing statistical measures to investigate the effectiveness of the two types of pre-listening activities, namely interactive and bottom-up pre-listening activities. Further, a questionnaire was administered for the interactive group after the post-test to investigate when learners relied on top-down processing, bottom-up processing and interactive processing. The major findings of the study are: first, results from participants’ listening scores revealed that there was no significant improvement between pre-test and post-test of the two groups although the mean scores of the interactive group were higher than that of the bottom-up group; second, results from the questionnaire indicated that participants employed top-down processing more frequently than bottom-up processing in their listening, while they viewed the understanding of each word (bottom-up processing) as essential to listening comprehension. Suggestions and implications are made at the end of the study.

Increasing involvement with students at the University of Namibia has indicated their overall difficulty with comprehending and recalling information from oral content lectures. It has also been observed that in general very little attention is given to the development of listening skills in L2 ESP and EAP courses. For this study, I conducted a quasi-experiment to determine whether the recognition and interpretation of discourse markers will enhance students' listening comprehension in academic lectures. Students were tested to determine their comprehension of content information in a video-taped lecture. Qualitative data were collected by means of a questionnaire. After an intervention period of eight weeks, where the experimental group received strategy training in the recognition and interpretation of discourse markers in spoken texts, both groups were again tested. Their results were statistically compared. I also looked at related findings of other researchers. Finally, aspects for possible future research will also be considered. / English Studies / MA - (Specialisation in TESOL)