Engaging in frequent, meaningful conversation during the early years of schooling is foundational for children's literacy development. Specifically, developing oral language through daily conversations is essential for language comprehension, and eventually, reading comprehension. In this article, we discuss how teachers can use the…

Engaging in frequent, meaningful conversation during the early years of schooling is foundational for children's literacy development. Specifically, developing oral language through daily conversations is essential for language comprehension, and eventually, reading comprehension. In this article, we discuss how teachers can use the…

This study explores science teachers' questions encouraging students to see and speak about natural phenomena in novel ways. In particular, the teachers' challenging questions that may be instrumental in persuading students to see and talk about everyday events differently were qualitatively examined. The participants were 22 science teachers.…

The present study explored strategies teachers use to help people with ASD develop sociosexual skills for empathy expression. Previous research found the curriculum for people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) does not always include strategies to teach the socio-sexual skills required for empathy expression. This qualitative descriptive study…

This article seeks to reframe how early childhood educators think about their role in play by answering these questions: What really matters in play? How should we spend our time and energy planning, implementing, and building our expertise around play in early childhood teaching and learning? The answers reside in 5 big ideas from play research…

In simultaneous prompting procedures, an immediate (i.e., 0-s) prompt is presented during all training trials, and transfer to the target discriminative condition is assessed during daily probes. Previous research suggests that simultaneous prompting procedures are efficacious and may produce acquisition in fewer errors to mastery when compared to…

Mands are a vital skill for the development of a child's communicative repertoire and are typically a major focus of early intensive behavior interventions (EIBI). Naturalistic teaching is more efficient than Discrete-Trial Training (DTT) for teaching mands (Jennet, Harris, & Delmolino, 2008); and therefore, the present study used crucial…

As a contrast to race evasive discourse, I share three conversations about the racial slur known as the N-word. These conversations were documented as part of a parent child autoethnography in which I attempted to enact antiracist pedagogy as a white parent of white children. Grounded in the frameworks of Critical Race Parenting and antiracist…

Drawing on the rhetorical/relational goal theory, this study examined the role of instructor clarity and non-verbal immediacy in affective learning through the mediation of instructor understanding. Data were gathered through close-ended questionnaires from 756 Chinese and 715 Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) students, the factor…

Moving from arithmetic to algebraic thinking at early grades is foundational in the study of number patterns and number relationships. This qualitative study investigates mental computational activity in a third grade classroom's and its relationship to algebraic thinking and reasoning. The data sources include classroom observations, field notes,…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often demonstrate deficits in spontaneous language during play and other social interactions. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of an instructional procedure that could be used during play to increase tacts by three 4-year-old children with ASD. A multiple-probe across behaviors…

The overall aim of the present study is to study model-based teaching and the collaborative inquiry learning of chemical processes and physical phenomena in preschool, with a specific focus on the verbal communication established between teachers and children (4-5 years old). According to variation theory, learning is always directed at a specific…

Better conversational skills correspond to a higher quality of life for adults diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In this study, we taught vocal--verbal responses discriminated by compound arrangements of concealed conversation partner mands to two college students with ASD. Participants learned to engage in self-questioning about…

James P. Lantolf is George and Jane Greer Professor Emeritus of Language Acquisition and Applied Linguistics and former director of the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. He is currently Adjunct Professor of Applied Linguistics in the same academic unit at Xi'an Jiaotong…

This paper introduces a new observation system that is designed to investigate students' and teachers' talk during literacy instruction, "Creating Opportunities to Learn from Text" (COLT). Using video-recorded observations of 2nd-3rd grade literacy instruction (N=51 classrooms, 337 students, 151 observations), we found that nine types of…