The purpose of this paper is to provide background for the vision statement, "An Argument-based Framework for Valid and Actionable Assessment for English Learners in Secondary Grades." We begin by identifying the problem we intended to address in the vision statement for an assessment framework. This is followed by a discussion about the…

An intelligent computer-assisted language learning (ICALL) system is an application to provide users instruction and practice as they learn a second language. In order to be more effective and more widely adopted, ICALL must better align with second language acquisition (SLA) research, moving away from menu-based or fill-in-the-blank exercises and…

Situated in China and under the context of curriculum reform, this project is an effort to combine long-time separate research streams in language teaching and learning studies: the history-in-person perspective (Holland & Lave, 2001) and the discourse analysis perspective (Cazden, 1988). Informed by the concepts of…

The Inclusive Reading Club for Young Children presented the study of organizing the reading club activities as an inclusive setting that promote the literacy skills and language development (such as hold books, re-tell story, comprehensive reading skills, response to wh-questions, writing their name) of young Dual language learners, child with…

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic many schools were forced to interrupt in-person delivery of educational services and switched to delivery of instruction in a remote setting. The educational impacts of school closures and remote instructional delivery have become a concern for the impact on an entire generation of students. Although delivery of…

In this chapter I address what I see as the cornerstone for advancing our understanding of how results from empirical research into L2 interactional development can usefully be brought to bear on L2 education--be it curriculum design, teaching or testing--, namely an epistemologically coherent understanding of interactional competence and its…

More than half of the students with visual impairment (VI) have an additional developmental disability (DD) in the United States. Young children with VI and DD are at risk for language delay and these children need planned learning experiences to increase their language skills. Teachers of students with VI (TVI) have received training and special…

The present study focuses on the development of Spanish pronominal processing. We investigate whether the "pronoun interpretation problem" (i.e., reflexive pronouns comprehension is resolved at an earlier age than that of personal pronouns, also known as the "Delay of the Principle B Effect"), which has been documented in other…

What is the function of babbling in language learning? We examined the structure of parental speech as a function of contingency on infants' non-cry prelinguistic vocalizations. We analyzed several acoustic and linguistic measures of caregivers' speech. Contingent speech was less lexically diverse and shorter in utterance length than…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to analyze verbal and nonverbal maternal response types following infant vocalizations in younger (ages 4-8 months) versus older (ages 10-14 months) infant groups and their potential implications for infant vocal development or word learning. Method: Maternal response types that occurred within 3 s of infant…

This response to Fleer, Adams & Gunstone builds upon "Transformative pedagogy: Dinka playgroups as spaces for cultural knowledge productions of Western science" by expanding conceptual understanding of the cultural practices of Dinka refugee children. Drawing upon both disciplinary literacy research and research into the role of play…

We suggest that prior to school entry, our earliest "teachers" and "learning settings" --that is, our parents, caregivers, and homes--provide signals about our environmental conditions. In turn, our brains may interpret this information as cues indicating the types of environments we will likely face and adapt accordingly. We…

Iconic and pointing gestures are important precursors of children's early language and cognitive development. While beat gestures seem to have positive effects on the recall of information by preschoolers, little is known about the potential beneficial effects of observing beat gestures on the development of children's narrative performance. We…

This study examines the nature of stop accuracy and substitute patterns of word-initial Japanese and Mandarin stops produced by Mandarin-Japanese bilingual children. The purpose of the study is to understand phonological development in bilinguals. The sample consists of 36 bilingual children between the ages of three and six, who simultaneously…

In a recent article published in this journal, Moscati and Crain (M&C) showcase the explanatory power of a learnability constraint called the Semantic Subset Principle (SSP) (Crain et al. 1994). If correct, M&C's argument would represent a compelling demonstration of the operation of an innate, domain specific, learning principle. However,…