One crucial aspect of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)-based foreign language learning in instructional settings is vocabulary growth. As a consequence, research should be interested in how CLIL fosters vocabulary learning. Noticing an apparent shortage of data-driven quantitative research on vocabulary growth in this field of CLIL…

Collocational competence is recognized to be integral to native-like L2 performance, and concordancing can be of assistance in gaining this competence. This study reports on an investigation into the effect of symmetrical and asymmetrical scaffolding on the collocational competence of Iranian intermediate learners of English in the context of…

A pragmatic randomised controlled trial was used to investigate the effects of two forms of shared reading on children's language and literacy skills. Parents of 80 children in the preparatory year of school participated in an eight-week home reading intervention. Families were assigned to one of three groups: dialogic reading (DR), dialogic…

Targeted to children as young as 3 months old, there is a growing number of baby media products that claim to teach babies to read. This randomized controlled trial was designed to examine this claim by investigating the effects of a best-selling baby media product on reading development. One hundred and seventeen infants, ages 9 to 18 months,…

Two approaches to grammar instruction are often discussed in the ESL literature: direct explicit grammar instruction (DEGI) (deduction) and indirect explicit grammar instruction (IEGI) (induction). This study aims to explore the effects of indirect explicit grammar instruction on EFL learners' mastery of English tenses. Ninety-four…

The study investigates the preschool readiness of moderately preterm children and, in particular, the likely presence of learning disabilities at preschool age. Its theoretical model detects linguistic comprehension and expression; memory-related metacognition and cognition skills; orientation and motor coordination skills; premathematics and…

In this research, parents and children participated in a comprehensive book reading intervention designed to improve children's literacy. Over eight weeks during the summer, children in the intervention condition were encouraged to read one book weekly and parents were trained to foster reading comprehension. Forty-eight Grades 3 and 5 children…

Previous studies have highlighted early differences in bilinguals' rate of language acquisition in comparison with monolinguals. However, these differences seem to disappear with increasing age and exposure to the language, and do so quicker in dominant community languages than in minority status languages. This study aimed to replicate these…

This study investigates the effects of rich explanation, baseline vocabulary, and home reading practices on English language learning (ELL) preschoolers' sophisticated vocabulary learning from storybook reading. Eighty typically developing preschoolers were pretested in L1 (Portuguese) and L2 (English) receptive vocabulary and were assigned to…

We examined receptive language and academic abilities in children with selective mutism (SM; n = 30; M age = 8.8 years), anxiety disorders (n = 46; M age = 9.3 years), and community controls (n = 27; M age = 7.8 years). Receptive language and academic abilities were assessed using standardized tests completed in the laboratory. We found a…

This study examines whether aural processing of input in a situation of implicit instruction can build a knowledge base that is available for both comprehension and production tasks. Fifty-five Dutch students learned a miniature linguistic system based on Spanish. Three training conditions were compared in which noun-adjective gender agreement was…