Browsing by Subject "listening comprehension"
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Item The Development of Listening and Reading Comprehension Screening Measures to Inform Instructional Decisions for End-of-Second-Grade Students(2012-07-11) Carreker, Suzanne 1954-The premise of the Simple View of Reading is that reading comprehension is the product of two components ? decoding and language comprehension. Each component is necessary but not sufficient. To support teachers in identifying end-of-second-grade students who may have difficulties in one or both of the components, parallel listening comprehension and reading comprehension screening measures were developed and investigated in two preliminary pilot studies and one large-scale administration. The first pilot study, conducted with 41 end-of-second-grade students, established administration times for the listening comprehension screening (LCS) and the reading comprehension screening (RCS) and confirmed the appropriateness of the 75 items on each of the measures. The second pilot study, conducted with 12 end-of-second- grade students with varying reading levels, demonstrated that the LCS and RCS could differentiate readers with good comprehension from readers with poor comprehension. The large-scale administration, conducted with 699 end-of-second-grade students, aided in the development of shorter final versions of the LCS and RCS and provided data to determine the score reliability and validity of the final versions of the measures, each of which had 42 items. Item response theory (IRT) was used to identify the most apposite and discriminating items for use on the final versions of the LCS and RCS. Score reliability (Cronbach?s alpha) on the final LCS was estimated to be .89 and was estimated to be .93 on the final RCS. Various sources provided content and criterion-related validity evidence. In particular, criterion-related validity evidence included strong correlations with the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests and strong sensitivity, specificity, and positive predictive indices. Construct validity evidence included group differentiation and a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), all of which supported a single underlying construct on the LCS and a single underlying construct on the RCS. In a subset of 214 end-of-second-grade students from the larger study, partial correlation and structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses supported the discriminant validity of the LCS and RCS as measures of comprehension. The listening and reading comprehension screening measures will assist second-grade teachers in identifying student learning needs that cannot be identified with reading-only comprehension tests.Item The Utilization of Listening Strategies in the Development of Listening Comprehension among Skilled and Less-skilled Non-native English Speakers at the College Level(2011-02-22) Liu, Yi-ChunThis 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.