Given their significance in daily life and frequent inclusion in clinical and educational assessments, children's narrative abilities merit investigation. The present study examines the narratives of children acquiring an additional language, adding to the more abundant studies of monolingual children. Sixty kindergartners (mean age 68 months)…

Purpose: Using a longitudinal design, this study aimed to describe inferential comprehension abilities of neglected French-speaking preschool children from 42 to 66 months of age in comparison to non-neglected peers, to examine the association with receptive vocabulary, and to determine whether rates of change in inferential abilities over time…

This longitudinal study documents a trilingual child's struggle with decoding and word recognition, the remedies sought to help him start reading in his second language (English) while he was in French immersion, and his performance after the intervention on tests of phonological awareness in L1 Romanian, L2 English, and L3 French. The study…

Cross-linguistic studies describing the syllabic structures of babbling productions agree on the high prevalence of the CV structure, but few have addressed the other types of syllables emerging during this pre-linguistic stage. However, studying the evolution of the distribution of syllabic structures during babbling would make it possible to…

Sometime before their second birthday, many children have a period of rapid expressive vocabulary growth called the vocabulary spurt. Theories of the underlying mechanisms differ: Accumulator models emphasize the accumulation of experience with words over time to yield a spurtlike pattern, while cognitive models attribute the spurt to cognitive…

While the language portrait (LP) is a visual research method that can make visible speakers' multilingualism, this article considers how and why speakers may use the LP to make elements of their linguistic repertoire "invisible." Analysing the portraits created by three primary school students in Luxembourg, I explore why these young…

Research on assessing English as a foreign language (EFL) development has been growing recently. However, empirical evidence from longitudinal analyses based on substantial samples is still needed. In such settings, tests for measuring language development must meet high standards of test quality such as validity, reliability, and objectivity, as…

This systematic review reports on research investigating the impact of multi-word unit (MWU) input on young learners' second language (L2) attainment in instructed settings. Recent findings suggest that L2 learners can generalise from MWU input, abstract patterns and employ such schemata productively via slot-filling, indicating that MWUs are key…

This exploratory study examines the relationship between executive functioning (EF) skills and the development of first (L1) and second language (L2) skills of preschool students. The participants of this study are enrolled in a French immersion program offered at an inclusion school combining students with disabilities (special needs) and those…

Several researchers (e.g., Allen & Paesani, 2010; Maxim, 2009; MLA Report, 2007) argue that the language-literature divide limits language development in many foreign language departments and that the speaking skill is the most affected by this common two-tiered curriculum (Swender, 2003). This study investigates the implementation of the…

In many autistic children, speech onset is delayed and expressive language emerges after 3 years of age. We qualitatively and quantitatively describe oral productions of autistic preschoolers, including many non- or minimally speaking, recorded during interactions with a caregiver and with an experimenter. Data clustering on manually coded oral…

Within a broad turn toward identity-focused pedagogies, educators are increasingly recognizing the critical impetus to engage with gender in expansive and inclusive ways. However, challenges persist. Often inadequate supports are exacerbated by a lack of empirical investigations into whether and how gender-just language teaching may contribute to…

This chapter examines the responses of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to assessment-related challenges introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic. The sudden move to online teaching and assessments required institutions to re-think their approaches to current practices and provide alternative solutions almost overnight. Our survey aimed to gather…

This paper is an analysis of Francophone immigrant parents' experiences of child language brokering in the Western Cape province of South Africa. Using a qualitative research design, data was collected by means of semi-structured interviews from nine immigrant parents who were selected through a convenience and snowball sampling technique. Through…

This study examines the usefulness of a Process Drama approach for supporting the development of linguistic and communication skills of preservice teachers learning French as a world language in an Early Childhood Education licensure program. Process Drama is an interactive approach to teaching language in which the teacher and students carry out…