this study aims at uncovering the effect(s) of genre-based instruction (gbi) on listening proficiency among iranian efl learners. moreover, it seeks to explore the relationship between effectiveness of gbi and listening proficiency. for this purpose, 68 efl learners in two different groups at zabol university were selected. group a included 30 participants (12 males and 18 females), and group b...

This study focused on the effect of two factors of complexity and salience and the mixture of both on listening comprehension. Advanced learners were divided into four separate groups (complex-salience-mixture-control) and each group was tested by different listening tests. Each group received a pre-test, 10 sessions of during-test instructions and a final post-test. The results showed that the...

Previous research on the perception of foreign accent has largely focused on speaker-dependent factors such as Age of Learning and Length of Residence which are specific to an individual speaker. Factors that are independent of particular speakers and their language learning history have also been shown to affect perception of second language speech. The present study examined two speaker-indep...

Disturbing factors like reverberation or ambient noise can impair speech recognition and raise the listening effort needed for successful communication in daily life. Situations with high listening effort are thought to result in increased stress for the listener. The aim of this study was to explore possible measures to determine listening effort in situations with varying background noise and...

A psychoacoustic experiment has been conducted to determine the difference limen (DL) of the level of music reproduced in a listening room. The effects of three factors on the DL were measured using up to twelve trained subjects. The factors were music motif (Mozart, Elgar, Smashing Pumpkins), listening level (50, 60, 65, 70, 80 dB, A-weighted Leq) and dynamic range. It was hypothesised that th...

This paper presents a system that makes use of machine listening techniques to analyse an incoming musical audio signal and determine various musical properties such as dynamics, tempo, and style. With this knowledge, the system generates an expressive drumbeat to accompany the input audio signal in real time. These drumbeats are created with a set of genetic algorithms which are designed to mo...

the aim of the current study was to examine the effect of metacognitive instruction on efl learners’ metacognitive awareness of listening strategies, listening comprehension, and oral language proficiency. fifty students of two upper-intermediate english courses participated in the study and were sampled as the experimental and control groups. for sixteen weeks the experimental group participat...

The paper focuses on revealing the factors that cause the deterioration of the naturalness of synthetic speech. Modified listening tests are used for this task, as we also need to determine the impact of each considered factor. Synthetic speech generated by the single candidate version of our TTS was examined with the use of modified listening tests, and the most prominent deterioration factors...

as the main part of a large-scale project, the present study investigated the relationship among reflective thinking, listening anxiety, and listening comprehension of iranian efl learners with regard to their proficiency level. to this end, 223 (106 intermediate and 117 advanced) adult male and female iranian efl learners from a private language institute took part in the study by completing t...

In this two-year longitudinal study, we sought to examine the developmental relationships among early narrative listening comprehension and language skills (i.e., vocabulary knowledge, sentence memory, and phonological awareness) and the roles of these factors in predicting narrative listening comprehension at the age of 6 years. We also sought to examine the role of inference-making skills as ...