Lessons designed to teach reading and listening typically concentrate on the use of higher-level skills and strategies, such as predicting, scanning, inferencing, understanding text structure, or activating background knowledge. Given that these normal communication skills are already available to students for mother-tongue use, they should…

Testing a component model of reading comprehension in a randomized controlled trial, we evaluated the efficacy of 4 interventions that were designed to target components of language and metacognition that predict children's reading comprehension: vocabulary, listening comprehension, comprehension of literate language, academic knowledge, and…

Testing a component model of reading comprehension in a randomized controlled trial, we evaluated the efficacy of 4 interventions that were designed to target components of language and metacognition that predict children's reading comprehension: vocabulary, listening comprehension, comprehension of literate language, academic knowledge, and…

Children entering kindergarten and grade 1 vary greatly in their emergent literacy skills. Because preschool teachers can help set the foundation of literacy skills related to school readiness, one way to address those gaps is to build teachers' capacity to apply evidence-based strategies in their language and literacy instruction.…

Although a general limited availability of expository texts currently exists in preschool special education classrooms, expository tests offer speech-language pathologists (SLPs) a rich context for addressing the language goals of preschool children with language impairment on their caseloads. Thus, this article highlights the differences between…

"Professional Learning Community: Emergent Literacy" was developed to support preschool teachers through collaborative learning experiences in a literacy professional learning community (PLC). PLCs are a form of professional development in which small groups of educators with shared interests work together with the goals of expanding…

The aim of the current study is to determine what language activities Norwegian preschool children took part in, and to examine whether these language activities predict children's language comprehension. We tested children (n = 134) with language measures at age 4/5 and age 5/6 and interviewed their teachers (n = 71) about the kinds of language…

Previous research has found that the single argument of unaccusative verbs (such as "fall") is reactivated during sentence processing, but the argument of agentive verbs (such as "jump") is not ( and ). An open question so far was whether this difference in processing is caused by a difference in thematic roles the verbs assign, or a difference in…

The Effects of the Language for Learning curriculum (Engelmann & Osborne, 1999) on through-the-air (i.e., signed and/or spoken) English skills for students who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) were examined by means of a single-subject, concurrent-multiple-probes-across-participants design. Four 11-year-old participants varied in auditory…

For spot-dictation purposes, song lyrics can be duplicated with blanks for the words or structures that are desirable to emphasize. Lyrics quite often have repetitious structures and vocabulary, and lend themselves to reinforcing new forms or concepts. This procedure can encourage general listening comprehension while highlighting one particular…

Discusses a study that attempted to create and test the validity of an error analysis model usable by high school teachers. Results indicate that, in themes that do not contain significant mechanical errors, syntactical errors do not lead to a breakdown of meaning. Numerous syntactical errors, however, do create comprehension problems. (15…

Experimental research on the environmental conditions that promote generative language learning is reviewed. Recombinative generalization is introduced as a process that enables individuals to express and to comprehend novel utterances. This review focuses on the use of a miniature linguistic system paradigm to explore how recombinative…

Studies of age differences in second language learning ability are collected along with commentary on the results. The 12 papers describe long and short term studies of children and adults that focus on the optimal age for second language acquisition, the effect of different teaching methods and environments on age differences, and theories that…

Suggests that the activity of retelling a story in a second language reveals a student's knowledge of vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and sense of story. Describes a story-telling activity with students in Spanish, levels three-five, and notes a strong relationship between language proficiency and years of study. (SED)

An instructional manual for reference use in college and university teaching is presented, based on a 2-year study of the specific difficulties that students have in receptive communication (listening and reading) in introductory courses. Although the investigation focused primarily on the disciplines of psychology, physics, and philosophy, many…