ABSTRACT
Oral communication skills-the ability to comprehend and produce oral discourse-are crucial in nearly every educational, business, and scientific setting of language use. Yet the development of oral communication skills remains a difficult theoretical and practical problem, and traditional language teaching approaches regularly fail to help many learners. The central problem addressed by this research project was to design a computer assisted language instruction system that could help beginning language learners develop their aural comprehension abilities. The reasons for targeting beginners as well as listening comprehension were threefold. First, relatively little software is directed at true beginners. Second, relatively little software is directed at improving listening comprehension. Third, the computer environment is best suited to work in teaching listening.
