We draw from an ethnographic research perspective to examine the potential benefits and pitfalls of dual-language secondary classrooms. The data collected come from multiple sources including classroom observations and teacher interviews from dual-language secondary classrooms. A secondary dual-language education conceptual framework is presented.…

Analysis of progression in spoken English by newcomer migrant-background learners has traditionally oscillated between formal assessment of oral proficiency and ethnographic description of naturally occurring peer discourse. This paper reports on data gathered from a longitudinal study of newly arrived students with English as an additional…

Criterion referenced tests of second language speaking performance are administered in different institutions using different procedures. The present study reports raters' practices of second language speaking tests, in particular the correspondence between test-takers' grades when assessed individually and in groups. Data derived from…

Purpose: This article is concerned with the growing body of international evidence indicating that adolescents in contact with the youth justice system are likely to have severely compromised oral language skills, receptively and expressively. A smaller, but persuasive, literature also points to poor literacy skills in this population. Language…

Background: This small-scale study investigated English vocabulary exposure from graded readers and teacher talk in Grade 3 classrooms in poorly resourced township schools in South Africa. Vocabulary is one of the key building blocks for becoming a fluent reader. Most words are learnt through incidental exposure to oral or written language.…

The current study investigated the extent to which L2 learners' productive vocabulary knowledge could predict multiple dimensions of spontaneous speech production. A total of 39 English as a foreign language (EFL) participants with varying L2 proficiency levels first completed a productive vocabulary knowledge task (Lex30). Their spontaneous…

Hardly any work has been done on the features of Philippine English in the clausal level from spoken discourses from a professional group. This paper compares the cases of inverted subject-auxiliary in embedded questions of the same group of professionals between 1999 and the years of 2016-2019, thus spanning almost 20 years. A total of 167 hits…

This study investigated early indicators of Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs) at risk for reading difficulties at the end of Grade 2 by examining their early bilingual oral language development, taking into account language of academic instruction. Standardized measures of reading and narrative samples were collected in English and Spanish…

The comparison between spoken and handwritten production in picture naming tasks represents an important source of information for building models of cognitive processes involved in writing. Studies using this methodology systematically reported longer latencies for handwritten than for spoken production. To uncover the origin of this difference…

This article synthesises progress made in the description of spoken (especially conversational) grammar over the 20 years since the authors published a paper in this journal arguing for a re-thinking of grammatical description and pedagogy based on spoken corpus evidence. We begin with a glance back at the 16th century and the teaching of Latin…

Elementary-level foreign language education is currently receiving a lot of attention in the literature on second language learning, and has emerged as an important educational policy issue. The present study aims to contribute to this discussion by focusing on the fluency benefits gained from early foreign language teaching. The participants were…

This review article starts with an overview of changing education paradigms and the literature on cognitive and linguistic relationships in imaginative play related to comprehension of oral and written texts. Strategies for developing the cognitive and linguistic foundations for text comprehension through play are described. A review of current…

We examined earlier oral narrative and decoding and later reading in two samples spanning the first four years of reading instruction. The Year 1 sample (n = 44) was initially assessed after one year of instruction (M = 6; 1 years) and followed through their third year (M = 8; 1 years); the Year 2 sample (n = 34) assessed after two years of…

This study explored the extent to which kindergarten and first grade teachers provided individualized reading instruction to struggling readers during a unique one-on-one reading instruction task. Three outcomes of teachers' instructional strategies were captured: code-focused strategies, meaning-focused strategies, and level of challenge. Child…

A systematic review of research on oral language assessments for four-to-eight-year- old children was undertaken to support a six-year action research project aimed toward co-creating classroom oral language assessment tools with teachers in northern rural and Indigenous Canadian communities. Through an extensive screening process, 10 studies were…