To examine whether children's acquisition of perspective-marking language supports development in their ability to reason about mental states, we conducted a longitudinal study testing whether proficiency with complement clauses around age 3 explained variance in false-belief reasoning 6 months later. Forty-five English-speaking 2- and 3-year-olds…

Teaching children scientific vocabulary is an important part of science education and should be carefully considered when planning units of work so that children can understand new words and apply them to their learning (Sewell, 2018). This view is echoed in the aims of the National Curriculum in England, which states that pupils should be able to…

Research has suggested the important role of vocabulary knowledge in second language (L2) speaking proficiency. However, earlier studies tended to disregard the congruence in test format between assessing vocabulary knowledge and speaking skills with the former predominantly measured in written format. The current study measured vocabulary…

Escape games are an increasingly popular leisure activity involving a group of players completing tasks to achieve a pre-defined goal, which is usually escaping from a room. In this chapter, I briefly outline the educational potential of escape game activities in language classes within the frameworks of gamification, pervasive learning, and…

Ofsted's 2021 Curriculum Research Review outlines a language pedagogy predicated on an exclusively cognitivist approach to language learning, which relies on three 'pillars of progression': phonics, vocabulary and grammar. The review makes a brief acknowledgement of the importance of motivational factors, including 'pupils' positive views of…

First language acquisition is implicit, in that explicit information about the language structure to be learned is not provided to children. Instead, they must acquire both vocabulary and grammar incrementally, by generalizing across multiple situations that eventually enable links between words in utterances and referents in the environment to be…

This article provides a reflective commentary on the modification of the lead author's professional practice in a secondary academy in England. The modification of practice has been as a result of work conducted on a postgraduate Masters module, which has focused on practitioner development of an exemplar grammar lesson devised for Year Nine…

This article critically examines the literature around grammar and grammatical terminology. It is essentially a critical consideration of the debates in England and Wales in four main parts. Part 1 considers debates in policy, the "What", i.e. grammatical terminology from the perspective of national policy as defined by the English…

Background: Children with language impairment (LI) show heterogeneity in development. We tracked children from pre-school to middle childhood to characterize three developmental trajectories: resolving, persisting and emerging LI. Methods: We analyzed data from children identified as having preschool LI, or being at family risk of dyslexia,…

Children learning English as an additional language (EAL) are a growing population of learners in English primary schools. These children begin school with differing levels of English language proficiency and tend to underperform in relation to their non-EAL peers on measures of English oral language and reading. However, little work has examined…

Analysis of progression in spoken English by newcomer migrant-background learners has traditionally oscillated between formal assessment of oral proficiency and ethnographic description of naturally occurring peer discourse. This paper reports on data gathered from a longitudinal study of newly arrived students with English as an additional…

This study examined the progress in lexical and grammatical knowledge among 252 learners of French in England across the last two years of primary education and into the first year of secondary school in relation to teaching and teacher factors. It compared linguistic outcomes from two different approaches, one which emphasized oracy and the other…

The Foreign Language Learning (FLL) programme aimed to improve the English language attainment of Year 3 and 4 pupils through a detailed curriculum of weekly French classes with linked activity in English lessons. The programme, created by the Education Development Trust (formerly CfBT), lasted for three half-terms. French classes were 45 minutes…

This paper examines the difficulty in reading French experienced by English students at Advanced Subsidiary Level (AS), taken at age 17, and the need for vocabulary learning to assist comprehension. Research has shown that intermediate learners need knowledge of some 5000 word families, and that specifications for the General Certificate of…

This article looks at ways in which the notion of music as a language with a literature operated in English girls' secondary education in the inter-war years. It explores musical literacies and multi-modality in the music curriculum of two inter-war music teachers working in girls' schools: Margaret Donington and Annie Warburton. Both contributed…