New pedagogical views on assistive listening devices have enlightened the technology's impact on communication patterns among students with a hearing impairment. The objective of this study was to find methods to evaluate assistive listening devices supporting a more dialogue-oriented and participatory learning environment. With this approach a three-dimensional communication quality definition was proposed. The dimensions are: 1) Speech intelligibility 2) Ambient sounds; annoyance and feeling of presence 3) Parameters concerning the students' performance given the aim and task of the pedagogical situation. In this experiment dimensions 1 and 2 were evaluated, where dimension 2 concerned annoyance. Speech intelligibility was assessed using just-follow-conversation (JFC) tasks performed by normal hearing subjects. The task consisted of adjusting the level of a masker until the listener felt he or she just could understand what was being said. In conjunction with the JFC task, the subjects were asked to estimate the annoyance of the masking signal on an eleven-point scale. The speech and masking signals were filtered by impulse responses generated in a room acoustic model. Design variables were: A) Room acoustic model; two acoustic properties B) Distance between speech source and microphone; 0.75 m or 1.5 m C) Noise masker; speech-spectrum random noise or structure-borne noise D) Microphone directivity; omni-directional or delay-and-sum beamformer E) Amplifier; linear or compression.