Foundational literacy is a key lever for achieving higher levels of learning and societal wellbeing. However, with an enrolment of over 250 million children in schools, India is currently challenged by learning deprivation. Growing uptake of English-medium education along with less-than-optimal English literacy instruction practices present an…

Foreign language was recently added to Japan's national primary school curriculum. Phoneme-Grapheme Recognition (PGR) skills are a critical step in both L1 and L2 development. Due to its simplistic approach and the lack of new investment in teacher training, research regarding the impact on PGR skills are important. This study tested the relative…

Globally, K-12 schools are embracing practices of social and emotional learning (SEL) to address students' interactional and emotional needs and to create a safe and nurturing environment for their learning. As a curricular program and approach to pedagogy, SEL instruction socializes learners into specific social and cultural ways of naming,…

Purpose: Typically developing (TD) bilingual children usually produce narratives with preserved macrostructure (i.e., narrative scheme) but with impaired microstructure (i.e., language complexity). As for monolingual and bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD), they usually produce narratives with both impaired macro- and…

This study aims to investigate the impact of digital storytelling activities on children's language skills, specifically focusing on expressive, receptive, and narrative abilities, as well as their utilization of technological elements in their stories. The study involved 18 children who were enrolled in a public kindergarten classroom, and it…

Background: Although the reading of science texts has been reported for high school learners, there is not much research on how younger learners engage with expository texts and how they develop academic language skills. In the instance of this study, the topic came from the curriculum content about animal reproduction. Aim: The study from which…

Background: The high number of poor-performing learners in reading comprehension in South African schools is a concerning factor that calls for studies to mitigate this problem. The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) of 2021 indicates that about 81% of South African Grade 4 learners who participated, failed to reach the…

In this article, the author describes how to use "story retelling wheels" as scaffolding devices to support young learners as they develop the important skill of being able to retell stories that they have heard and comprehended. This tool can be adapted to meet young learners at different English language and literacy levels. It…

Literacy in a first language or in additional languages involves a set of complex cognitive, social, and linguistic skills that develop over time. However, pedagogical materials for low-proficiency English as an additional language (EAL) learners tend to target low-level literacy skills only, such as responding to fact-based questions. Materials…

Educational systems worldwide underscore the importance of developing higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) to prepare students for the new challenges of the XXI century. Some pressing issues faced by educators include the ambiguity of the construct; the implementation of HOTS in classroom practices; and the implications for teaching students from…

Background: South Africa's "Language-in-Education Policy" (LiEP) provides for bi/multilingual education, but schools are only supported to choose monolingual English language policies from Grade 4 and ignore the learners' home language or languages as resources for learning. Many teachers translanguage orally, using the learners' home…

Purpose: The primary aims of this study were to: (1) to describe average change in the writing quality of fifth grade students from the fall and spring of the school year; (2) examine relations between linguistic features and writing quality rating; and (3) test for differential growth between groups of students who differ in linguistic and…

Oral language skills underpin children's educational success and enhance positive life outcomes. Yet, significant numbers of children struggle to develop competence in speaking and listening, especially those from areas of high economic deprivation. A tiered intervention model, graduating the level of provision in line with levels of need, has…

Dynamic assessment (DA) integrates assessment and instruction into an organic unity aimed at promoting learner development through mediation sensitive to the individual's (or in some cases, a group's) current abilities. This article reports on the construction of a model of mediation framed within DA for English-as-a-foreign-language listening…

Development of child language is tremendously complex, remarkable and wondrous. In a second language acquisition context, a child can acquire his second language in either acquiring both languages at the same time or learning the second language after mastering the first one. This present research is concerned to describe the syntactical…