Purpose: The purpose of this study was to compare change in emergent literacy skills of preschool children with and without hearing loss over a 6-month period. Method: Participants included 19 children with hearing loss and 14 children with normal hearing. Children with hearing loss used amplification and spoken language. Participants completed…

A multiple probe design across skills was used to examine the effects of behaviour skills training (BST) on teaching four reading comprehension skills (predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing) to a 7th grade student with autism. Following baseline, the student received 12 sessions of BST during which each skill was taught to…

This study examines the relationship between the repetition of oral monologue tasks and immediate gains in L2 fluency. It considers the effect of aural-oral task repetition on speech rate, frequency of clause-final and midclause filled pauses, and overt self-repairs across different task types and proficiency levels and relates these findings to…

The kinds of errors that children and adolescents make on phonological processing tasks were studied with a large sample between ages 4 and 19 (N = 3,842) who were tested on the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement-Third Edition (KTEA-3). Principal component analysis identified two phonological processing factors: Basic Phonological Awareness…

The ability to present effectively is essential for professionals; therefore, oral communication courses have become part of the curricula for higher education studies. However, speaking in public is still a challenge for many graduates. To tackle this problem, driven by the recent advances in computer vision techniques and prosody analysis,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate and compare the effects of group-to-whole student-led oral discussion and small-group collaborative drafting as pre-writing tasks on Iranian intermediate English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' writing performance. Additionally, the difference between the writing components was examined.…

Purpose: This study investigated the effects of a family literacy program on Latino parents' language practices at home and their children's oral language skills. The study examined the extent to which (a) the program called "Family Reading Intervention for Language and Literacy in Spanish" was effective at teaching low-income,…

This study is the first to examine contributions of proficiency subskills to pragmatic development. We used the latent growth curve modeling to reveal the causal relationships between proficiency subskills and pragmatic competence in 109 American learners of Chinese across two data points over three months abroad in China. Proficiency was measured…

This paper reports how robot-assisted language learning (RALL) impacts Japanese adults' English speaking skills. With existing research on RALL focusing on children, there is little evidence indicating RALL's effects on adults. We developed a RALL system comprising a robot, a tablet, and designed learning materials for speaking practice. To…

Anxiety in the classroom presentation has a debilitating effect on students' success in learning a foreign language (FL) or a second language (L2). This article aimed at investigating students' Anxiety in classroom presentation in Teaching-Learning Interaction of English as a Foreign Language for Students of Indonesian Study Program in general at…

This paper examined language anxiety (LA) in Chinese dialects and Putonghua among college students in mainland China and explored the links between their LA in the first language and a range of sociobiographical variables (i.e. gender and geographical background) as well as linguistic variables (i.e. mother tongue, age of onset of acquisition,…

Focusing on 84 Chinese-English dual language learners (DLLs) in U.S. preschool programs serving children from low-income backgrounds, this study investigated which aspects of the home language and literacy environment and which parenting styles may be related to these DLLs' oral receptive and expressive language abilities in Chinese and English.…

Teachers of year 0/1 students in English-medium schools in New Zealand (1896 schools) were invited to participate in a survey focussed on assessment of new entrant children's oral language and emergent literacy skills, with an estimated 21% response rate (N = 745). Teachers indicated using a variety of methods for assessing children's skills at…

Prior research on reading difficulties has mainly focused on word decoding problems. However, there exists another group of children -- poor comprehenders (PCs) -- who have normal word decoding abilities but difficulties in reading comprehension. Less is known about PCs especially in non-alphabetic languages such as Chinese. This study identified…

The growth of Thailand's medical tourism industry has inevitably made English oral communication skills become increasingly important to Thai medical personnel, especially to nurses who have to act as medical mediators between doctors and patients. Thus, in order to prepare nursing students for their future career, it is necessary that English…