The paper deals with the problem of carrying on online written exams in the University of Milan, suddenly closed due to the Covid-19 emergency. Main goal of the paper is to present and compare the different scenarios envisioned, depending on the number of students to be monitored in parallel to avoid cheating. For limited numbers, direct…

Verb use and the production of verb argument structure in the written texts of children in elementary school is a key stepping stone towards academic writing success that has remained relatively unexplored and is a notable gap in our understanding of writing development. To evaluate the role of verbs in the written narrative texts of children, we…

Email has become the most preferred form of business communication. Writing "good" email has become an essential skill required in the industry. "Good" email writing not only facilitates clear communication, but also makes a positive impression on the recipient, whether it be one's colleague or a customer. The aim of this paper…

In this classic edition of their ground-breaking work, Usha Goswami and Peter Bryant revisit their influential theory about how phonological skills support the development of literacy. The book describes three causal factors which can account for children's reading and spelling development: (1) pre­school phonological knowledge of rhyme and…

This manuscript reports on a corpus-based comparison of native and nonnative graduate students' language production in an asynchronous learning environment. Using 486 discussion board postings from a five-year period (2009-2013), we analyzed the extent to which native and nonnative university students' writing differed in 10 measures of syntactic…

The study examined the effects of "Process Assessment of the Learner" ("PAL"), a writing expression curriculum. The program was tested with second-grade students in a suburban-rural school district in the southeastern United States. Three sections of PAL lessons were implemented in the district as a small-group curriculum…

Working with students who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) can raise questions about whether language and literacy delays and difficulties are related directly to late and limited access to spoken language, to co-occurring language learning disabilities (LLD), or to both. A new Test of Integrated Language and Literacy Skills, which incorporates…

Patients with letter-by-letter alexia may have residual access to lexical or semantic representations of words despite severely impaired overt word recognition (reading). Here, we report a multilingual patient with severe letter-by-letter alexia who rapidly identified the language of written words and sentences in French and English while he had…

Using Moore's (1993) theory of transactional distance as a framework, this action research study explored students' perceptions of audiovisual feedback provided via screencasting as a supplement to text-only feedback. A crossover design was employed to ensure that all students experienced both text-only and text-plus-audiovisual feedback and to…

Recent studies suggest that basic effects which are markers of visual word recognition in Indo-European languages cannot be obtained in Hebrew or in Arabic. Although Hebrew has an alphabetic writing system, just like English, French, or Spanish, a series of studies consistently suggested that simple form-orthographic priming, or…

The purpose of the present study was to examine the impact of multi-tasking with digital technologies while attempting to learn from real-time classroom lectures in a university setting. Four digitally-based multi-tasking activities (texting using a cell-phone, emailing, MSN messaging and Facebook[TM]) were compared to 3 control groups…

This contribution compares literacy instruction in three different scripts in Eritrea. It uses data stemming from classroom observations of beginning readers of Tigrinya (Ge'ez script), Arabic (Arabic script) and Saho (Roman alphabet), the examination of teaching materials, and teacher interviews. Our analysis focuses on literacy events. We…

The aim of the present study was to use functional imaging to compare cortical activations involved in reading Hindi and English that differ markedly in terms of their orthographies by a group of late bilinguals, more fluent in Hindi (L1) than English (L2). English is alphabetic and linear, in that vowels and consonants are arranged sequentially.…

English is written with interword spacing, and eliminating it negatively affects English readers. Chinese is written without interword spacing, and adding it does not facilitate Chinese readers. "Pinyin" (romanized Chinese) is written with interword spacing. This study investigated whether adding interword spacing facilitates reading in Chinese…

This study explores task-based, synchronous oral computer-mediated communication (CMC) among intermediate-level learners of Spanish. In particular, this paper examines (a) how learners in video and audio CMC groups negotiate for meaning during task-based interaction, (b) possible differences between both oral CMC modes and traditional face-to-face…