The Elicited Imitation Task (EIT) is a popular technique for efficiently measuring global proficiency in multiple languages, and accumulated evidence indicates high reliability and strong relationships with other proficiency measures. Nevertheless, several dimensions of EIT design remain open to investigation, including the assumption that a pause…

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…

"Cross-situational statistical learning" of words involves tracking co-occurrences of auditory words and objects across time to infer word-referent mappings. Previous research has demonstrated that learners can infer referents across sets of very phonologically distinct words (e.g., WUG, DAX), but it remains unknown whether learners can…

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…

Negotiation of language form is thought to engage learning processes by helping learners to notice gaps in their developing L2 and find target-like ways of filling them. Self-transcription, where learners work together to find language errors in recordings of their own oral output, is an awareness raising exercise that encourages such negotiation.…

The way in which emotion interacts with cognition has been of great interest to researchers for hundreds of years. Emotion has been shown to play an important role in attention, learning and memory. However, the way in which emotion influences the basic process of word learning in infancy has largely been ignored. In the current paper, the…

Examines four different levels of development constituting writing as a technology for thinking. Discusses evolution (what speech affords thinkers), history (how text changed the collective construction of knowledge), ontogeny (how literacy affects the development of mind), and microgenesis (how writing facilitates thinking from moment to moment).…

Presents conversations of a group of fifth graders collaborating on a social studies task to illustrate how childen use language to learn. Focuses on one student whose oral language was rapid and chaotic but who demonstrated extremely sophisticated and complex structuring of knowledge to understand a particular social studies concept. (HTH)

This collection of articles on language teaching and language acquisition theories includes: "Enseignement des langues et theories de l'acquisition. Introduction au colloque" ("Language Teaching and Theories of Acquisition. Introduction to the Colloquium") (Rene Richterich); "Apprendre une langue dans l'interaction verbale" ("Language Learning in…

A study investigated whether syntactic differences between oral and written discourse interfere with the comprehension of beginning readers. Subjects were 28 second grade and 28 fifth grade students who read, orally, versions of stories identical in nature except for the structure of their syntactic patterns. One version contained structures more…

The purpose of this publication is to explain how a child learns and how language development is related to motor, emotional, and cognitive development. Following a brief introductory chapter, it presents a chapter on how a child learns, divided into the following categories: motor development; emotional development; language development; the…

Providing both rationale and technique for practitioners, this book emphasizes the influence of visual literacy upon the reading, writing, and creative development of learners. The nine chapters of the book are arranged into three sections, with the first setting forth the basic components of visual literacy and how they manifest themselves in…