American schools are becoming increasingly diverse, with an estimated 17 million first- and second-generation refugee and immigrant children residing in the United States. English learners navigate the challenges of learning how to read, write, and speak a new language, all while being expected to stay on grade level. Classroom teachers nationwide…

This study examined how ESOL teachers working with grades K-6 th provide ESOL services in the general education classroom. ESOL teachers were asked to describe and define their roles and provide examples of different language development activities. In addition, the perceptions and overall experiences of the ESOL teachers were analyzed. A basic…

This study had two aims. The first aim was to measure mental state understanding in institution-reared children by using a theory of mind (ToM) scale, and to examine the role of cultural context in sequencing of ToM acquisition. The other aim was to investigate ToM in relation to social competence and executive function (EF). Due to its pronounced…

The purpose of this systematic review was to examine whether online or computer-based technologies were effective in assisting the development of speech and language skills in children with hearing loss. Relevant studies of children with hearing loss were analysed with reference to (1) therapy outcomes, (2) factors affecting outcomes, and (3)…

Language acquisition involves learning not only grammatical rules and a lexicon but also what people are intending to convey with their utterances: the semantic/pragmatic component of language. In this article we separate the contributions of linguistic development and cognitive maturity to the acquisition of the semantic/pragmatic component of…

Twenty-nine infants aged 1;1 and their mothers were videotaped while interacting with toys for 18 minutes. Six experimental stimuli were presented to elicit infant communicative bids in two communicative intent contexts--proto-declarative and proto-imperative. Mothers' verbal responses to infants' gestural and non-gestural communicative bids were…

Computerized technologies now offer unprecedented opportunities to provide real-time visual feedback to facilitate children's speech-language development. We employed a mixed-method design to examine the effectiveness of two speech-language interventions aimed at facilitating children's multisyllabic productions: one incorporated a novel…

This study examined the validity and reliability of different measures of morphosyntactic complexity, including the Morphosyntactic Complexity Scale (MSCS), a novel adaptation of the Developmental Sentence Scoring, in French-speaking school-aged children. Seventy-three Quebec children from kindergarten to Grade 3 completed a definition task and a…

Many children experience recurrent acute otitis media (RAOM) in early childhood. In a previous study, 2-year-old children with RAOM were shown to have immature neural patterns for speech sound discrimination. The present study further investigated the consonant inventories of these same children using natural speech samples. The results showed…

When bilinguals process written language, they show delays in accessing lexical items relative to monolinguals. The present study investigated whether this effect extended to spoken language comprehension, examining the processing of sentences with either low or high semantic constraint in both first and second languages. English-German…

Second language acquisition (SLA) as a sub-branch of applied linguistics has been researched by Chinese and foreign scholars for over 40 years, but few researches have been done on its implications for Business English teaching which needs more language teaching theories to support. This paper makes a review of related studies, and puts forward a…

This research study set out to explore the education practitioner's role in promoting communication development in early years classrooms. The study was undertaken in the combined nursery and reception early years unit of a small primary school using an ethnographic approach. Qualitative data was collected through 18 three-hour visits to the…

This longitudinal study involving 101 Dutch four- and five-year-olds charts indirect request (IR) and mental state term (MST) understanding and investigates the role that Theory of Mind (ToM) and general linguistic ability (vocabulary, syntax, and spatial language) play in this development. The results showed basic understanding of IR and MST in…

In this study, we explore the interconnectedness between children's creativity, social play, and language abilities. The participants were 225 (109 girls, 116 boys) preschool children, from diverse European American, African American, and Hispanic ethnic heritages. We assessed the children in three ways. First, each child completed the Goodenough…

Early childhood teachers should have extensive knowledge about language and language development, because these facets of professional knowledge are considered as important requirements for fostering language development in early childhood education settings. It is assumed that early childhood teachers acquire this knowledge during pre-service…