Research in sub-Saharan Africa investigating the effect of mother tongue (MT) literacy instruction at medium scale is limited. A randomized controlled trial of MT literacy instruction was implemented in 2013 and 2014 as part of the Primary Math and Reading (PRIMR) Initiative in Kenya. We compare the effect of two treatment groups--the base PRIMR…

The present study investigated the perceptions of parents and teachers on the use of the mother tongue and their preferred medium of communication and instruction for preschool children at home and in school. The sample was made up of a cross-section of parents and teachers (N=120, Female=80% for teachers and 55% for parents) of children (between…

This book contributes to the growing field of foreign language teaching and testing by shedding light on mediation between languages. Stathopoulou offers an empirically-grounded definition of mediation as a form of translanguaging and offers tools and methods for further research in multilingual testing. The book explores what cross-language…

Drawing on the notion of biliteracy as the "the conjunction of literacy and bilingualism," this article reports on multiple ongoing case studies of multilingual university students developing academic literacies simultaneously in French and English. Interview data and textual and video records of students' writing practices were used to…

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have difficulties acquiring the grammatical rules of their native language. It has been proposed that children's detection of sequential statistical patterns correlates with grammatical proficiency and hence that a deficit in the detection of these regularities may underlie the difficulties with…

Previous studies have investigated how second language (L2) readers construct memory for narrative texts according to causal relations between the events described. This study aims to extend their findings by including semantic text relations (similarity of meaning) as another variable, which are theoretically expected to play an additional role…

This study invited parents in 21 one-way Mandarin Chinese dual immersion programs in Utah to respond to a survey on-line. Five hundred and eighty parents participated in this study. The objectives of the survey study were to learn the parents' reasons for enrollment, their program satisfaction, and whether there was a group difference based on the…

This paper explores Saudi EFL students' beliefs on Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) at the University of Qassim. The study used a descriptive quantitative approach. Eighty-nine students have responded to the researcher-made questionnaire addressing six areas of the CLT (students' belief, the grammar function; the function of students' native…

Background/Context: Low-cost private schools (LCPSs) represent a large and growing share of schools in many low- and middle-income countries, including Kenya. In some Nairobi neighborhoods, more than half of children attend LCPSs, despite policies providing free access to public education. Parents generally choose LCPSs because they believe they…

This study aims to exemplify how language teaching can benefit from learner corpus research (LCR). To this end, this study determines how L1 and L2 English speakers with diverse L1 backgrounds differ with respect to adjective amplification, based on the "International Corpus of Learner English" (ICLE) and the "Louvain Corpus of…

Recent policy reforms in Scotland mean that all primary teachers are expected to teach a foreign language (FL) to children from age 5, introducing a second language around age 9. This small-scale research study aimed to ascertain 38 primary teachers' perceptions of their confidence to teach an FL to primary learners and what they felt would be…

Multi/bilingual education has been found to have the potential to provide more equitable education for linguistic minority students; nevertheless, these students have not fully benefitted from it due to unequal power dynamics and English-dominant language ideologies. While bilingual programmes in secondary schools remain extremely rare in the US,…

Relatively little is known about the long-term academic literacy development of refugee-background students, particularly at the postsecondary level. The purpose of this study was to understand how refugee students leveraged their cultural and linguistic resources to navigate a competency-based online college program. Using a multiple case study,…

This cluster-randomized controlled study examined dual language learners (DLLs) in Norway who received a book-based language intervention program. About 464 DLLs aged 3-5 years in 123 early childhood classrooms participated in the study. The children were acquiring Norwegian as their second language in preschool and spoke a variety of first…

This study set out to test the theoretical premise of the SSARC model of pedagogic task sequencing, which postulates that tasks should be sequenced for learners from cognitively simple to complex. This experiment compared the performance of three tasks differing in cognitive complexity in a simple-complex sequence versus in the absence of any…