The purpose of this study was twofold. First, this study was conducted to compare English communicative competency achievement between two different models of instruction. Adult English language learners (AELLs) participated in either the communicative task-based (CTB) or in a more traditional (MT) language instructional approach. The goal of the…

This is a quantitative research project utilizing secondary data. Reading Recovery and Leveled Literacy Intervention are two early literacy interventions based on a whole language and phonetic approach to reading instruction. For the purposes of this study, the end-of-first-grade benchmark is a Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) 18 and the…

Purpose: The primary purpose of this study was to investigate child impacts following implementation of a comprehensive language curriculum, the Language-Focused Curriculum (LFC; Bunce, 1995), within their preschool classrooms. As part of this larger purpose, this study identified child-level predictors of expressive language outcomes for children…

This study investigated the effects of two types of bilingual programs (two-way and transitional) on the academic performance and attitudes of fifth-grade students who entered kindergarten or first grade with different levels of English proficiency. A mixed methods design with both quantitative and qualitative data collection and analyses phases…

This paper examines evidence from a performance-pay program implemented in five Little Rock, Arkansas elementary schools between 2004 and 2007. Using a differences-in-differences approach, the evidence shows that students whose teachers were eligible for performance pay made substantially larger test score gains in math, reading, and language than…

This purpose of this randomized group experiment was (a) to test the post-treatment (i.e., immediately after treatment) and follow-up (i.e., 8 months after the end of treatment) efficacy of a treatment designed to facilitate both sentence length and speech intelligibility (i.e., broad target recast), and (b) to explore whether pretreatment speech…