Design features of American Sign Language (ASL)-English bilingual storybook apps on the tablet computers, based on learning research, are intended to facilitate independent and interactive learning of English print literacy and of ASL skill among young learners. In 2013, the Science of Learning Center on Visual Language and Visual Learning…

Drawing upon research on narrative and speech styles and on digital and multimodal communication, the author proposes multimodal narrative discourse analysis (MNDA) with associated pedagogical and analytical procedures to teach and study storytelling. The second language (L2) students first participated in multimodal narrative simulations in the…

The present study aims at presenting a thorough account of the field termed literary pragmatics which emerges in a consequence of applying the different pragmatic approaches to the study and analysis of literary genera. Additionally, it also attempts to explore and shed some light on the relationship between the two domains: pragmatics and…

The aim of the present study is to monitor the effectiveness of a new conception of early literacy curriculum (in force since September 2016) which provides -- unlike the previous one -- a wide range of purposeful literacy practices and literacy events. The study compares graduates of previous early childhood literacy curriculum (tested in June…

Maternal scaffolding and four-year-old children's linguistic skills were examined during toy play. Participants were 21 American-English monolingual and 21 Thai monolingual mother-child dyads. Results revealed cross-cultural differences in conversation styles between the two groups. American dyads adopted a high-elaborative style relative to Thai…

The role played by working memory (WM), that is, the capacity to temporarily maintain and cognitively process information, has been extensively studied in second language (L2) research. In a general sense, WM has been shown to be related to various aspects of L2 learning and use; however, little information is available regarding its relationship…

Speaking a language involves more than simply knowing the linguistic components of the message, and developing language skills requires more than grammatical comprehension and vocabulary memorization. In teaching-learning processes, drama method may have some positive effects on ELL students' speaking fluency and accuracy. This study attempts to…