A key to reducing reading difficulty, particularly for children living in poverty, is to provide high quality, explicit, and well-planned instruction from the start of a child's school career. Preschools that provide quality language, literacy, and content instruction have produced promising positive effects on children's later academic…

For busy classroom teachers, integrating instruction for English learners with literacy, reading, discourse, and social-emotional learning (SEL) may seem daunting. This research-backed guide offers evidence-based strategies core content teachers can use immediately to improve daily practice. The authors explore the importance of SEL application to…

Because listening has received little attention and the validation of ability scales describing multidimensional skills is always challenging, this study applied a multistage, criterion-referenced approach that used a framework of aligned audio passages and listening tasks to explore the validity of the ACTFL and related listening proficiency…

A substantial body of evidence demonstrates that infants understand the meaning of spoken words from as early as 6 months. Yet little is known about their ability to do so in the absence of any visual referent, which would offer diagnostic evidence for an adult-like, symbolic interpretation of words and their use in language mediated thought. We…

With growing evidence that learners of English as a second language (ESL) may face linguistic disadvantages when studying at English-medium universities, it is appropriate to identify the most effective ways to optimize their preparation. One area of interest is the relative importance university professors across disciplines place on language…

This paper investigates trainee teachers' preferences for English pronunciation and accent, enrolled in a teacher education program in Turkey with respect to listening activities, after they have familiarized themselves with the diverse English accents. Data has been gathered through semi-open-ended questionnaires, which are later analysed with…

Although the ideal in work with endangered languages is to design collaborative projects that integrate documentation and support for revitalization from the outset, the reality is that many language workers must rely on existing products of documentation to create materials. Traditional documentation, including reference grammars, dictionaries,…

For high school students with disabilities, one major component of learning in inclusive content area classes, such as English/language arts (ELA), involves listening to verbal information and recording notes. Learning how to record verbal information in notes is a critical skill for students to succeed in these classes. Therefore, this study…

Despite its importance in our learning and daily life, listening is 'the least understood and the least researched skill' [Vandergrift, L. 2007. "Recent Developments in Second and Foreign Language Listening Comprehension Research." "Language Teaching" 40: 191-201]. By utilizing listening journals and curated materials, this…

The present study was an effort to investigate the effects of flipped learning on EFL (English as a foreign language) learners' L2 speaking, L2 listening, and out-of-class participation and engagement with course materials and activities. To this end, 67 freshmen English students from two universities in Iran were assigned into one of the three…

Based on an experiment with 5452 kindergarten school children from 15 cities, this article examines the effect of a customised spiritual education programme (SEP) on their quality of life. Results showed that treatment group kindergarteners who participated in the SEP had higher scores on the Pictured Child Quality of Life Self-Questionnaire in…

The study was a qualitative case study which sought to establish the perceptions of students in the Faculty of Agribusiness and Commerce on Basic Communication Skills training at Victoria State University. Twenty-seven students from the faculty of Agribusiness and Commerce were purposively sampled to participate in the study. Observation and focus…

This study examined the idiosyncratic development of second language (L2) learners in a listening strategies course. The progress of four Taiwanese EFL learners was examined longitudinally through a variety of quantitative and qualitative techniques as the learners participated in a course combining direct instruction of strategies with their…

When teaching listening, second language instructors tend to rely on product-oriented approaches that test learners' abilities to identify words and answer comprehension questions, but this does little to help learners improve upon their listening skills (e.g., Vandergrift & Goh, 2012). To address this issue, alternative approaches that guide…

Motion events in language describe the movement of an entity to another location along a path. In 2 eye-tracking experiments, we found that comprehension of motion events involves the online construction of a spatial mental model that integrates language with the visual world. In Experiment 1, participants listened to sentences describing the…