The acquisition of communicative competence in second and foreign languages requires the incorporation of verbal and non-verbal elements. Notwithstanding, few studies have performed empirical research into the acquisition of non-verbal signs. This research studies the learning of emblematic gestures for students of Spanish in the USA using an…

This study compared the effects of listener training and tact training on the emergence of intraverbal responses in the form of foreign language equivalents of the native language. The study was based on Skinner's verbal operants with a focus on intraverbal responses. All participants received listener training and tact training after which a…

Purpose: Children make spelling errors despite classroom instruction on phoneme-grapheme connections and spelling rules. We examined whether additional practice helps to decrease the number of spelling errors for a morphological spelling rule. We distinguished explicit practice in applying a spelling rule from implicit exposure to correct word…

This analysis investigates two differential "PowerPoint" slide designs--presentation and teleprompter--for multimedia learning. Eye tracking measures assessed differences in fixations. Participants demonstrated greater fixation counts for teleprompter slides, measures of aesthetic liking evidenced that slides incorporating imagery…

This study investigates spelling abilities of 189 second, third, and fourth graders using a word and pseudoword dictation task in European Portuguese. We analyzed the effect of orthographic complexity on spelling accuracy and the moderating role of length (two vs. three syllables), lexicality (words vs. pseudowords), and grade (second, third, and…

When a student explains a biological phenomenon, does the answer reflect only the "product of retrieving knowledge" or does it also reflect a "dynamic process of constructing knowledge?" To gain insight into students' dynamic knowledge, we leveraged three analytic frameworks--structures--behaviors--functions (SBF), mental…

Purpose: Research has demonstrated that verbal instructions directing attention externally (i.e., toward the effect of the movement) significantly enhance motor skill performance, and this effect is enhanced when the distance of the external focus relative to the body is increased. However, few studies have investigated this distance-of-focus…

This instructional intervention investigated the potential for the text reconstruction task "dictogloss" to facilitate the learning of English verb-noun collocations, for example 'carry a risk'. Research has shown that learners have difficulties in using such collocations, but few useful instructional techniques are on offer.…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to review the role of self-efficacy in online education with an objective to propose a holistic framework for strengthening participants' self-efficacy, especially in the Asian context. Design/methodology/approach: To investigate the potential role of self-efficacy of the participants of online academic…

Social sustainability embraces literacy development as a means by which children integrate their knowledge in society and become powerful and meaningful. In this context, the development of writing among young children requires the design of new teaching strategies that allow for the multimodal repertoire brought by children into the classroom.…

The effects of class-specific compound consequences embedded in an identity-matching task to establish arbitrary emergent relations were evaluated. A 3-year-old child with autism was taught identity relations between lowercase letters (Set 1) and uppercase letters (Set 2). A compound stimulus that consisted of an auditory component (dictated…

We explored the vocabulary and metaphor comprehension of learners of English as an additional language (EAL) in the first two years of UK primary school. EAL vocabulary knowledge is believed to be a crucial predictor of (reading) comprehension and educational attainment (Murphy, 2018). The vocabulary of five- to seven-year-old children with EAL…

Listening is widely regarded as an important skill that is difficult and necessary to teach in L2 classrooms. Listening requires both top-down and bottom-up processing, yet pedagogical techniques for the latter are often lacking. This study explores the efficacy of pronunciation instruction (PI) for improving learners' bottom-up processing. The…

Effective intraverbal responding often requires control by multiple elements of a verbal stimulus. The purpose of this study was to examine the emergence of such intraverbal relations following tact instruction with compound stimuli and to analyze any resulting error patterns. Participants were seven typically developing children between 3 and…

Purpose: In this study, we investigate temporal adaptation capacities of children with normal hearing and children with cochlear implants and/or hearing aids during verbal exchange. We also address the question of the efficiency of a rhythmic training on temporal adaptation during speech interaction in children with hearing loss. Method: We…