The ability to express oneself through written language is a critically important skill for long-term educational, emotional, and social success. However, despite the importance of writing, English Learner students continue to perform at or below basic levels which warrants additional efforts to identify specific areas of weakness that impact…

This study aimed to describe 1-year changes in students' vocabulary in written narratives. Secondary aims included examination of accuracy and the relationship between lexical diversity and achievement. Participants included 749 students in first through eighth grades. Within-subjects 1-year change in diversity, productivity, and accuracy was…

Purpose: This study examines the written language samples of fifth grade English learner (EL) students with and without diagnosed language-based learning disabilities (LLDs) in an effort to explore the utility of such supplemental materials for aiding in differential diagnosis of ELs with and without LLDs. Method: This sample of 127 fifth grade…

This article contributes to the scarcity of research on the interface between task-modality and the use of previously known languages (PKL) in young learners. It examines the use of Basque/Spanish by CLIL learners (aged 10-11) during oral interaction while completing two collaborative tasks in English: a speaking task and a speaking + writing…

This study was designed to (1) investigate the procedure responsible for successful written subject-verb agreement, and (2) describe how it develops across grades. Students in Grades 3, 5 and 12 were asked to read noun-noun-verb sentences aloud (e.g., "Le chien des voisins mange" ["The dog of the neighbors eats"]) and write out…

This study examined syntactic comprehension in French children with dyslexia in both listening and reading. In the first syntactic comprehension task, a partial version of the Epreuve de Comprehension syntaxico-semantique (ECOSSE test; French adaptation of Bishop's test for receptive grammar test) children with dyslexia performed at a lower level…

The present study investigated the efficacy of early English immersion in the Shi Da Fu Elementary School in Xi'an, China. Three hundred and fifty one students were tested in Grades 1-6. There were two main purposes that motivated this longitudinal and cross-sectional study. The first goal was to compare the L1 and L2 language and literacy…