The question I raise in this paper is why measurement systems such as PISA have gained so much power in contemporary education policy and practice. I explore this question from the bottom up by asking what might contribute to the ways in which people invest in systems such as PISA, that is, what are the beliefs, assumptions and desires that lead…

Recent evidence has suggested that sleep may facilitate language learning. This study examined variation in language ability in 29 toddlers with Down syndrome (DS) in relation to levels of sleep disruption. Toddlers with DS and poor sleep (66%, n = 19) showed greater deficits on parent-reported and objective measures of language, including…

The present study investigated the contribution of executive functions to narrative writing in fourth grade children, and evaluated to what extent executive functions contribute differentially to different levels of narrative composition. The written skills of 102 Dutch children in fourth grade were assessed using a narrative picture-elicitation…

The effect of using a computer or paper and pencil on student writing scores on a provincial standardized writing assessment was studied. A sample of 302 francophone students wrote a short essay using a computer equipped with Microsoft Word with all of its correction functions enabled. One week later, the same students wrote a second short essay…

Why should second and foreign language teachers tune into instructed second language acquisition (ISLA)? There are many reasons, several of which have already been addressed in this forum. This paper examines one important benefit of keeping abreast of the field, namely, the opportunity for classroom instructors to extract pedagogical insights…

The purpose of this research was to determine the effects of Cardio-Syntactic Analysis instruction on writing scores in an 11th grade English class. The sample consisted of 35 students enrolled in an Honor's English 11 class at Volunteer high School, in Church Hill, TN. The class was randomly assigned into an experimental group of 17 students and…

Purpose: We examined the relationship between maternal level of education as an index of socioeconomic status (SES) on the narrative story retells of school-aged children who are English language learners (ELLs) to guide interpretation of results. Method: Using data available from the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts database (Miller…

This essay is about the improbable emergence of written language six millennia ago that gave rise to the even more improbable, highly sophisticated reading brain of the twenty-first century. How it emerged and what it comprises--both in its most basic iteration in the very young reader and in its most elaborated iteration in the expert reader--is…

This study investigated the elicited imitation task (EIT) as a tool for measuring linguistic proficiency in a second/foreign (L2) language, focusing on French. Nonnative French speakers (n = 94) and native French speakers (n = 6) completed an EIT that included 50 sentences varying in length and complexity. Three raters evaluated productions on…

Background: The phonological and morphosyntactic structures of English and Mandarin contrast maximally and an increasing number of bilinguals speak these two languages. Speech and language therapists need to understand bilingual development for children speaking these languages in order reliably to assess and provide intervention for this…

This study evaluates the effects of Age of Exposure to English (AoEE) and Current Input/Output on language performance in a cross-sectional sample of Spanish-English bilingual children. First- (N = 586) and third-graders (N = 298) who spanned a wide range of bilingual language experience participated. Parents and teachers provided information…

Home literacy environment explains between 12 and 18.5% of the variance of children's language skills. Although most authors agree that children whose parents encourage them to read tend to develop better and earlier reading skills, some authors consider that the impact of family environment in reading skills is overvalued. Probably, other…

The aim of a discourse-pragmatic approach to teaching the indicative/subjunctive contrast in Spanish is to engage students to move beyond grammar and semantics and enter the domain of language use in complete texts. Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research have mostly focused on the morphology, semantics and syntactic aspects of…

This study investigated the long-term effect of classroom-based input manipulation on children's use of subordination in a story re-telling task; it also explored the role of receptive vocabulary skills and expressive grammatical abilities in predicting the likelihood of priming. During a two-week priming phase, 47 monolingual English-speaking…

The goal of this article is to preserve and distribute the information presented at the LASI (2014) workshop on Coh-Metrix, a theoretically grounded, computational linguistics facility that analyzes texts on multiple levels of language and discourse. The workshop focused on the utility of Coh-Metrix in discourse theory and educational practice. We…