In the teaching of listening skills various ways of presenting oral material for comprehension are employed by English teachers in Japan. This study has evaluated various methods for initial presentation which are used to develop students' comprehension of naturally spoken utterances. A total of 88 English sentences (five-word to thirteen-word sentences) pronounced by native English speakers at normal speed were used as material, and 22 college students majoring in English participated in the experiments as subjects. By using dictation as a means for evaluation, it was found that (1) shorter utterances were more comprehensible than longer ones, (2) seeing the sentences of the utterances befor presenting them aurally improved comprehensibility of utterances drastically, while, (3) seeing the words or meaning (translation) of the utterances and repetition of utterances did not.

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A computer aided training system for the listening in foreign language education has been developed. The answers are read by a computer through the keyboard. The system compares the answers with the correct sentences. The rate of correctness is evaluated with each word. The level of the word correctness is displayed in color. The words with low level correctness are not displayed. The total correctness of the sentence is also evaluated and displayed. Therefore, in listening training using playback button, the students can concentrate on the parts of the sentence which they were not able to understand correctly. The evaluation just after the listening also encourages their willingness to study the language. The special feature of the system is that it can deal with misspelled words as well as out-of-order words. Therefore, listening training can be independent of the ability to write. Experiments using the system in L.L. have verified that the system is easily dealt with by students and helpful for training.

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The purpose of this paper is to examine what is essential in order to learn a foreign language, taking into consideration some phenomena observed in the process of language acquisition. The paper is composed of three sections. In the first section, language development is examined from linguistic, especially pragmatic and systemic point of view. In the second, inner activities in language development is examined on the basis of Dr. Bower's theory about developmental psychology. In the third, the difference of function between right and left hemisphere is considered in connection with language learning. In the end of the paper a model of memory-centered language learning strategy is presented as a key to the total grasp of the mechanism of language learning.

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Intonation is a main part of English prosody and it may be true that intonation is more important than the stress and pronunciation of each word in communicating with others. Two English Visual Speech Training System were installed at Hokuriku University last April. Now it became possible to carry out the visual feedback instruction of intonation and pronunciation of minimal contrast of vowel phonemes to students quite effectively and efficiently. It seems to me that the intonation analysis part of the Speech Training System has great power in helping Japanese students in overcoming the flat intonations which are commonly found among them. By making a graph of intonation on TV screen, this flat intonation can be easily compared to the sharply rising and falling of the model voice. This Speech Training System is very helpful in improving English pronunciation of Japanese students. This paper reports both great potential and some problems of the Speech Training System based upon the data collected through individual teaching of pronunciation.

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The purpose of this study is to show one of the important roles of course evaluation. Teachers usually give tests to measure now much effort students made or how much they improved their language skills at the end of the term. However, it is also necessary for teacher to know what and how much contribution the course gave to the students through teaching with the materials. A course evaluation is generally done by a multiple choice of questionnaire. Gathering the results of the answers to each item, we will able to get some profiles of the class, such as the students learning attitudes, and motivation, and the usefulness and degree of difficulty of the materials as a whole. This may help our further teaching, but developing a closer relationship among the components of the questionnaire is indispensable to the effective teaching of the course. From this point of view, the study was done by multiplying the data of the items.

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