Purpose: This paper describes oral language as a multi-faceted and unconstrained phenomenon, including its social purpose in societies and the implications of this for education. It provides a critique of the concepts of oral language which have come to dominate literacy and language education policy across the Organisation of Economic…

The present study examined the production of inalienable possession with body parts in Spanish among 20 school-age children of Mexican-born parents born and raised in the United States. The results were compared to those of 20 first-generation immigrant parents (main input providers), 27 Spanish-dominant children of similar age, and 12 Spanish…

This paper looks at the role of English in Brunei and the sociocultural structure of Bahasa/language in Brunei Darussalam. The aim of this research is to critically analyse sociocultural theory from Vygotsky's "peak psychology" approach and understand depth-knowledge of sociocultural theory from other scholars' perspectives. The…

The discussion of the power of the teacher's voice is raging again in light of the standardisation of education and the emergence of testing as the new regime of truth in educational processes. In confrontation with this paradigm, Jasinki and Lewis have raised pertinent questions regarding the role of language and the voice of the teacher. By…

This book provides a fresh approach to motivation in primary school children by exploring the role of metaphor and symbol in language and art as a means of expressing insights developed through learning. The book investigates and transcends Piaget's dominant child developmental theories and considers alternative theories from psychiatry, not least…

The presented study focuses on children aged from 5 to 6.5 who attend Czech kindergartens. Its purpose is to explore a potential positive impact of an educational game application on malleability of children's spatial skills through the application usage. The research was conducted as a pedagogical experiment in which the pre-test and post-test…

The study aimed at assessing Problems of Curriculum Relevance in Enhancing Children's Cognitive Development in Early Childhood Education (ECE) in Ethiopia. An explanatory sequential research design was employed through a multistage random sampling technique to collect primary data from the participants (N[subscript i]=260) through questionnaires…

This paper examines the acquisition of demonstratives (e.g., "that," "there") from a cross-linguistic perspective. Although demonstratives are often said to play a crucial role in L1 acquisition, there is little systematic research on this topic. Using extensive corpus data of spontaneous child speech, the paper investigates…

In order for children to understand and reason about the world in an adult-like fashion, they need to learn that conceptual categories are organized in a hierarchical fashion (e.g., a dog is also an animal). While children learn from their first-hand observation of the world, social knowledge transmission via language can also play an important…

This investigation of translanguaging is grounded upon the ubiquitous theme of "structures" explicitly and implicitly found in the translanguaging literature. Through this theme, this paper begins by providing a novel theoretical framework followed by considering the need for translanguaging (e.g., education's growth of multilingualism;…

This study took a novel approach to understanding the role of language in spatial development by combining approaches from spatial language and gesture research. It analyzed forty-three 4.5- to 6-year-old's speech and gesture production during explanations of reasoning behind performance on Spatial Analogies and Children's Mental Transformation…

Classifying people into categories not only helps humans simplify a complex social world but also contributes to stereotyping and discrimination. This research examines how social categorization develops by testing how language imbues with meaning otherwise arbitrary differences between people. Experimental studies (N = 129) with 2-year-olds…

Children are members of families and communities, and the languages learnt within these contexts contribute to a child's sense of "belonging, being and becoming" throughout life (Department of Education Employment and Workplace Relations, 2009). Encouraging children to bring their home languages into early childhood education and care…

In response to Golinkoff, Hoff, Rowe, Tamis-LeMonda, and Hirsh-Pasek's (2018) commentary, we clarify our goals, outline points of agreement and disagreement between our respective positions, and address the inadvertently harmful consequences of the word gap claim. We maintain that our study constitutes a serious empirical challenge to the word…

Exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) is associated with children's internalizing and externalizing problems. IPV is thought to impair mothers' ability to scaffold young children's emotion regulation through coregulated interactions. Mother-child language style matching (LSM) is an index of coregulation that has yet to be examined in…