The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of visual stimuli on music listening skills in pre-service elementary teachers. Visual Stimuli in this study refers to the presentation of arts elements in selected visually projected images of paintings. Music listening skills are defined as those skills needed to identify and interpret musical excerpts. A Pretest-Posttest Control-group Design was used in this study. Subjects were pre-service elementary general educators enrolled in a large southern university (N=93). Students from intact classes were randomly placed into either the experimental group or the control group. The treatment consisted of six music listening lessons over a two-week period with each group receiving the identical teaching protocol with the exception of the use of paintings with the experimental group. Listening instruction emphasized the identification of melodic contour, instrumentation, texture, rhythm and expressive elements of the compositions. The Teacher Music Listening Skills Test (TMLST) was constructed by the investigator and administered before and after the treatment. The TMLST was designed to assess music listening skills in adult non-musicians. Results indicate that the group receiving visual stimuli in the form of paintings scored significantly higher on listening skills (pandlt;.01) than the control group which received no visual stimuli in the form of visually projected images of paintings. There was an instruction effect on both preference and familiarity of the musical pieces for both the control group and the experimental group.

There is a great need for competent teaching of Business English in tertiary institutions in Vietnam. At the Hanoi Foreign Trade College (HFTC) alone, about 150 students per year seek training to equip them to work in export and import organizations, banks for foreign trade and customs departments. In teaching such students, one problem is the provision of interesting and relevant materials. This study addresses the question of selection of materials and techniques for teaching business English listening skills. This Field Study Report consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 describes the purposes and aims of study, the background to this study, dealing with students, the teaching and the curriculum. Chapter 2 looks at the general theory about listening and in particular listening in business. The chapter also describes listening requirements for business graduates from the HFTC. Chapter 3 discusses criteria for selection of textbooks for language teaching in general and for teaching listening skills in business English in particular. Chapter 4 surveys the teaching of business English in two institutes of Technical and Further Education in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). The final chapter makes suggestions for priorities to improve the teaching of business English. This Field Study Report should be regarded as an exploratory attempt in choosing classroom techniques and materials for teaching listening skills to students of commerce at the Hanoi Foreign Trade College.

This paper is a curriculum proposal for a mid to high beginner adult English as a Second Language class. It is hoped that this curriculum will prove to meet students’ academic needs, especially in terms of development of literacy, listening skills, and language learning strategies. In addition to this, the lessons include a critical orientation; that is, the class is structured to facilitate student engagement with social issues, namely racism and economic struggles. With these considerations in minds, two units comprising half the semester were developed and relevant extra materials are provided. / text

Thesis (MTech (Education))--Cape Technikon, 1998. / Adequate listening skills as an indispensable communication skill positively affect the learning process. Adequate listening skills are essential to lecturers' teaching and students' learning performance at technikons in the Western Cape. The standard of training/education in listening skills of lecturers teaching English at technikons in the Western Cape has raised concern, as it is considered a vital skill in the learning process. A questionnaire completed by lecturers teaching English at these technikons suggests a lack of adequate listening skills when assisting students in the learning process. As points of departure, information was collected on how lecturers can enhance appreciative and creative listening; what teaching strategies the lecturer can use to encourage students to listen constructively; whether workshops are conducted to improve listening skills; whether training is available for this purpose at certain technikons; and whether the use of audio-visual material in a listening programme will assist in more effective student listening. This information was then processed in terms of the aims formulated for this study.

The purpose of this study was to investigate factors related to teaching listening in elementary school music and to make recommendations toward an ideal course of study in listening.

For many students, listening to academic lectures is one of the hardest listening skills (Lebauer, 1988). There are various possible reasons for this: the jargon and specialised words of the field that are used; also the language that is used is often at a more formal level; the lecture situation which is unidirectional with the listener having little role to play, and no control of the oral message; the expectations that the listener is assumed to have in listening to lectures which depends on many factors such as attitude, motivation, linguistic knowledge and world experience. Trying to find an answer to where difficulties lie is the purpose of this study, with the focus on the type of problems that post-graduate non-native students of English might have had during their study in a native English academic environment. Chapter one presents the purpose and significance of study, and deals with a few problems in the history of the teaching of listening in Vietnam. Chapter two looks at the different developments in understanding the listening processes in general and listening to lectures in particular. Chapter three studies difficulties that non-native speakers of English may face in lecture listening. Chapter four mentions some of the recommendations that the study implies.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of active listening skills on perpetrator response style in crisis negotiations. The extant literature boasts the utility of negotiations in crisis situations for law enforcement that came about in response to cataclysmic events such as the Attica Prison Riots (1971), Munich Massacre (1972), and the Williamsburg incident (1973). Various crisis negotiation models assert the importance of active listening skills in crisis negotiations; given the recent and voluminous media attention on police, this research aimed to provide further support for a cultural shift in police departments around the country to provide their officers with crisis negotiation training. These trainings allow officers to expand their arsenal of tools that decreases their need to rely on a tactical response when verbal de-escalation may be warranted to minimize risk to both officer and subject. The proposed study coded and analyzed audio recordings from the first 20 minutes of 12 simulated negotiations. The author proposed: (1) an increase in the proportion of active listening skills within the first phase of the negotiation would be associated with a decrease in the proportion of negative perpetrator response style in the second phase of the negotiation, (2) an increase in the proportion of active listening skills within the first half of the negotiation would be associated with an increase in the proportion of positive perpetrator response style in the second half of the negotiation, (3) an increase in the proportion of problem-solving utilized during the first phase of the negotiation would be associated with an increase in the proportion of negative perpetrator response style in remainder of the negotiation, and (4) an increase in the proportion of emotional labeling, paraphrasing and summarizing, and open-ended questions utilized during the first half of the negotiation would be associated with an increase in the proportion of positive perpetrator response style in the second half of the negotiation. While no significant results were identified via Pearson’s correlations, scatterplots were constructed for visual inspection of the data, which indicated potential support of hypotheses II and IV when considering the limitations of the study.

Communication between the patient and healthcare professional is pivotal in enabling effective self-care management to occur (Street et al., 2009) which in turn leads to improved health outcomes (Kravitz et al., 1993). However, there is little published data exploring the most effective tools for evaluating whether these communication skills occur and what particular attributes enhance the process (Goodchild, Skinner & Parkin, 2005; Heisler et al., 2003; Parkin & Skinner, 2003). This study aims to identify patient-centred communication skills occurring in consultations and to explore their link with a tool-recording agreement on reported decisions made. Quantitative analysis was conducted on 86 dietetic consultations across four outpatient diabetes services. Audio recordings from 20 of these were qualitatively analysed. Greater agreement on reported decisions correlated significantly with level of empathy demonstrated (t = .283, p = .0005). In consultations featuring agreement, dietitians expressed more empathy (p = .02), used more active listening skills, asked significantly more exploratory questions on self-care practices (U = 18.5, p = .007), provided significantly more supportive/collaborative information-giving exchanges (U = 11, p = .003) and were more likely to set an agreed agenda at the start of consultations. In contrast, consultations featuring disagreement had low levels of empathy, fewer active-listening skills and exploratory questions, significantly greater numbers of persuasive information-giving exchanges (U = 17, p = .007) and more recommending exchanges. Generally, agendas were not set. In conclusion, recording patient/healthcare professional agreement on reported decisions made during a consultation is a simple tool that can indicate the presence of patient-centred communication skills. Active-listening skills allow expressions of empathy that facilitate patient involvement and interactive dialogue. The measure of agreement should be used frequently as a marker of effective dietetic consultations and to provide further data on the relationship between patient-centred communication and implementation of behaviour change for improved health outcomes.

The problem of this study was to measure the impact of a read-aloud approach combined with direct teaching methodology on student achievement/attitudes and school expenditures. The purpose of this study was twofold. First, the study was to determine the relative impact of three treatments on student reading and listening skills, vocabulary development, and attitude towards reading. The first treatment was read-aloud based on specific recommended texts combined with direct teaching methodology. The second treatment was read-aloud based on specific recommended texts. The third treatment, the control, was simply a read-aloud-based program. The second purpose of the study was to compare the relative cost and effort required by the three treatments. The 226 subjects in this study were selected from the population of third—grade students from three metropolitan early childhood centers. The subjects were pretested and posttested with the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS), a criterion-referenced vocabulary test and the Estes Attitudinal Scale. Analyses of covariance and after F-test multiple comparisons were used to compare the relative impact of the three treatments on a preselected set of criterion variables.

DIFFERENT PHYSICAL ACTIVITY MEN AND WOMEN COMMUNICATION PECULIARITIES Margarita Skvarčienė Lithuanian Academy of Physical Education, Kaunas, Lithuania SUMMARY Scholarly opinions about the differences between men and women are more than academic; opinions about gender differences have personal, professional and political implications. Many scholars lamented that too few theories existed to explain sex differences in communication. Although theory still lags behind descriptive research, researchers have made advances in theoretical explanations of sex and gender differences. This study present different physical activity male and female similarities as well as differences in communication. As we researched, we hypothesized that: physically active men and women have better listening skills, than physically sedentary men and women; physically active men and women have tendency to have greater demand of communication, than non active men and women; physically active men and women have better communication skills, than physically passive men and women. The object of the current study is gender communication peculiarities. The aim of the work is to evaluate different physical activity men and women communication peculiarities. To obtain this aim, we determine these propositions: 1. to evaluate different physical activity men and women listening skills and to compare them by gender aspect; 2. to evaluate different physical activity men and women demand of communication, and... [to full text]