Assessment of the classroom as a communication channel
Sigfrid D. Soli, Jean A. Sullivan · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2001
The classroom is an environment in which spoken language communication facilitates and enables students in the learning of essential academic, social, and cultural skills. As such, the classroom defines a communication channel for learning. Our research has focused on the special requirements placed on this communication channel by the student listener. Our strategy is to quantify the effects of age, developmental status, hearing status, and English proficiency on speech intelligibility in noise and to find the signal/noise ratios that enable all students to obtain high intelligibility. Using these signal/noise ratios, acceptable noise levels and reverberation times for the classroom communication channel are estimated. Our studies of young children for whom English is either the primary language (EPL) or the secondary language (ESL) will be reported. The method of estimating the special requirements these children place on the classroom communication channel will also be described. Acoustic measurements from six elementary school classrooms in which ESL and EPL children are taught will be presented, and these classrooms will be evaluated in relation to the communication channel requirements.