Pakistan has constantly been in the news since the September 9, 2001, attack in New York, USA, and its education system and curriculum have seen a lot of interest from academics, researchers, and civil society organizations, both locally and globally. These researchers explored many aspects such as the concept of Jihad and its connection with…

Middle school social studies teachers are increasingly working on argument writing in their classrooms so that students can successfully write counterarguments that acknowledge competing perspectives about historical and social issues by the end of eighth grade. The authors' prior research indicates that eighth-grade students "can" grow…

Assessment and evaluation are key aspects of teaching and instruction, which serve to promote learning through better planning. The procedures should be robust and be able to depict the grey areas for later reviews. Writing as an integral component of literacy, deals with convention and purpose -- essentials that need to be incorporated in…

This cross-sectional study investigated first (L1) and second (L2) language receptive and expressive vocabulary in a sample of 542 typically developing bilingual children of immigrants (age range 6-13), coming from six different L1 backgrounds in Norway. Results demonstrated that children's L1 and L2 vocabulary skills increased with age. From a…

Almost two centuries of British colonial rule in the Asian subcontinent came to an end in 1947 with the creation of a new state named Pakistan and an independent state of India. On 14 August 1947, the state of Pakistan was born primarily as a homeland for Muslims. The Pakistani constitution states that primary education should be free and…

This collaborative action research project in Alberta, Canada, explored how dual-language books (DLBs) can foster literacy instruction and learner engagement through language awareness. Canada's changing demographics have resulted in mother tongue diversity and many urban schools identifying at least 25% of students as being English language…

Most refugees in countries of permanent resettlement arrive from first-asylum countries -- countries where refugees initially move to escape crisis in their homelands. Their pre-resettlement educational experiences have largely been undocumented. This qualitative ethnographic study describes the literacy practices of four elementary-aged Afghan…

One form of educational inequality is the disparity that exists between urban and rural settings. Equal distribution of quality education is a challenge for developing countries due to the unavailability of resources. Various approaches to equal distribution are distance learning, telecast learning and e-learning; however, these approaches cannot…

Children and young people from migrated families often learn host languages faster than their parents might do, and from very young ages they help their parents, families or community members by translating or interpreting, known as child language brokering (CLB). Language brokers need to mediate with different languages in different contexts and…

The present study examined the language and literacy skills and their relations to each other in multilingual children, who have a broad range of oral and written language proficiency in each language that they "know". Reading and vocabulary skills were tested in 50 Canadian children (ages 6-10 years) who were Urdu-English speakers,…

The question of script was paramount in the nineteenth-century debate over Hindi and Urdu, two closely related languages that are characterised by "extreme digraphia". Rather than rehearsing the well-known story of the culturally and politically charged process of differentiation in which the two sister languages became prime markers of…

This paper assesses the reliability and validity of cognitive and socioemotional skills measures and investigates the correlation between schooling, skills acquisition, and labor earnings. The primary data from Pakistan incorporates two innovations related to measurement and sampling. On measurement, the paper develops and implements a battery of…

The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of the delegation of financial authority to public primary schools through Parent-Teacher Councils (PTCs) on learning outcomes of primary school children in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, Pakistan. The learning outcomes were measured in three subject areas (Urdu, English, and Mathematics).…

Textbooks are the only available source/s of teaching and learning English in Pakistani public education system. Whether the textbooks serve their intended purposes as mentioned in the National Curriculum of English, the researchers conducted a mixed methods teachers'-led evaluation to investigate the effectiveness of English textbooks. The study…

This study examined the vocabulary development of Norwegian second language (L2) learners with Urdu/Punjabi as their first language (L1) at two time-points from kindergarten to primary school, and compared it to the vocabulary development of monolingual Norwegian children. Using path models, the associations between number of picture books in the…