Feedback penetrates many walks of our lives, and its importance in L2 teaching and assessment is well recognised. However, while corrective feedback and writing feedback have been the focus of much L2 research and classroom practice, there seems relatively little attention to feedback on spoken interactional skills. Concomitantly, translating…

In psychological assessment, there is a tension between oral and written language. This tension is rarely troubled or even noted in clinical practice. For report writing purposes, psychologists routinely transform oral, socially embedded material into written texts. In this paper, I highlight three points in the psychological assessment process…

To learn to read, the brain must repurpose neural systems for oral language and visual processing to mediate written language. We begin with a description of computational models for how alphabetic written language is processed. Next, we explain the roles of a dorsal sublexical system in the brain that relates print and speech, a ventral lexical…

Classroom discussions represent a common learning activity for students in schools. The prevailing discourse has focused on how to encourage as many students as possible to participate actively in classroom discussions with the assumption that only vocal students are engaged learners. The present essay critically challenges this position by…

Digital badges are graphical representations of an accomplishment. Open badges are a subset of digital badges, an image file in which additional data, metadata, are embedded. Not only will an open badge contain a description of the badge, the criteria, the issuer and issue date, but also, when appropriate, standards, tags, expiry date and…

The Spring 2020 semester will be marked in our history as one of the most challenging semesters for higher education, although through the adversity, we were presented with opportunities for classroom innovation. A reflective account of the teaching insights gained from implementing a COVID-19 miniunit and utilizing remote oral examinations is…

School psychologists are often involved in evaluating students who have been referred for reading problems or are suspected of having dyslexia. To accomplish this task, it is important to have a thorough understanding of dyslexia, and know what factors to consider. Therefore, the purposes of this article are to describe: (1) the primary and…

Imagination is rarely acknowledged as one of the main workhorses of learning. Unfortunately, disregarding the imagination has some clearly negative pedagogical impacts: Learning is more ineffective than it should be and much schooling is more tedious than it need be. In this paper, we outline a somewhat new way of thinking about the process of…

The cumulative body of eye movement research provides significant insight into how readers process text. The heart of this work spans roughly 40 years reflecting the maturity of both the topics under study and experimental approaches used to investigate reading. Recent technological advancements offer increased flexibility to the field, providing…

Educators generally are concerned with testing what learners know by means of written tests, as if knowledge was some intrapsychological thing or state that could be translated and externalized into some interpsychologically available inscription that is a more-or-less accurate approximation of what the person knows. In such endeavors, language is…

In this paper it is proposed that the prefrontal lobe participates in two closely related but different executive function abilities: (1) "metacognitive executive functions": problem solving, planning, concept formation, strategy development and implementation, controlling attention, working memory, and the like; that is, executive functions as…

Over the past few decades perspectives on second language (L2) pronunciation have evolved from pessimistic appraisals of the capabilities of L2 learners and doubts about the value of instruction to a view of pronunciation teaching as an effective and important part of language pedagogy. Earlier research on the teaching of pronunciation dwelt…

Mercer, N. (1995) coined the term interthinking to link the cognitive and social functions of group talk. Essentially, interthinking means using talk to think collectively, to engage with others' ideas through oral language. In this article I share four excerpts from small group interactive read-aloud sessions that were conducted with Grade 1…

Describes the Verbal Transformation Effect (VTE): When listeners hear the same word repeated very many times at a rapid rate, the word tends to be perceived as other words. Reports lexical effects in the VTE and examines their cause. (Author/VWL)

Describes a framework for examining the effects of the cognitive complexity of tasks on language production and learner perceptions of task difficulty, and for motivating sequencing decisions in task-based syllabuses. Results of a study of the relationship between task complexity, difficulty and production show that increasing the cognitive…