Research on the implementation of CLIL at the onset of primary school is limited and has largely overlooked the role of other sources of individual differences. This study investigated the effects of the CLIL approach to English learning, together with the effects of out-of-school exposure to the language through media and other sources of…

Purpose: The extant literature suggests that individual differences in speech perception can be linked to broad receptive language phenotype. For example, a recent study found that individuals with a smaller receptive vocabulary showed diminished lexically guided perceptual learning compared to individuals with a larger receptive vocabulary. Here,…

Analytical writing poses particularly challenging, yet often overlooked, language demands that need attention in educational research and practice. In this article, I discuss the Core Analytical Language Skills (CALS) construct and its relevance for school reading and writing. CALS refer to the set of learners' school-relevant language resources…

A second language can be learned inside and outside the classroom. In this study we investigated the English and French vocabulary knowledge of 110 Dutch-speaking children (age 10-12), who received 100 hours of instruction in French, whereas their contact with English came from out-of-school exposure only. We examined the role of individual…

Purpose: This case-control study sought to determine if (a) children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), other speech sound disorders (SSDs), and typical development would perform differently on a procedural learning assessment and (b) whether grammatical ability would impact group differences. Method: Communication, motor, and procedural…

Forty-two adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) ages 10 to 21 years completed a battery of language and phonological memory measures twice, 2 years apart. Individual differences were highly stable across two years. Receptive vocabulary scores improved, there was no change in receptive or expressive grammar scores, and nonword repetition scores…

The purpose of this study was to find out, whether three methods of presenting input, were effective in relation to language aptitude. Persian-speaking learners of English were provided with 20 grammatical collocations (verb-preposition collocations) embedded in authentic passages, lexically/grammatically elaborated passages, and…

Speech and language ability is not a unitary concept; rather, it is made up of multiple abilities such as grammar, articulation and vocabulary. Young children from socio-economically deprived areas are more likely to experience language difficulties than those living in more affluent areas. However, less is known about individual differences in…

This study investigated the long-term effects of structural priming on children's use of indirect speech clauses in a narrative context. Forty-two monolingual English-speaking 5-year-olds in two primary classrooms took part in a story-retelling task including reported speech. Testing took place in three individual sessions (pre-test, post-test 1,…

This article reports research into the development of vocabulary in lower-intermediate level learners of French as a foreign language in Year 12 in 20 schools in the south of England. The focus of attention is the role of less common, or non-basic, vocabulary at a stage in students' learning when they have just moved to a much more advanced…