Historically, US schools have failed multicultural and multilingual children of colour and marginalized expansive conceptualizations of home and community literacy practices. Given the importance of fully inclusive education, this article seeks to understand the ways in which young multilingual and multicultural children take up issues of…

This study investigated the multiple roles of morphological awareness in reading comprehension for Spanish-speaking language minority (LM) learners and their native English-speaking (NE) peers. Sixth-grade students (N = 137; 82 LM, 55 NE) were assessed on English measures of derivational morphological awareness, morphologically complex academic…

Conversational repair often occurs in conversations when people attempt to address communicative breakdowns or inaccuracy by way of repeating what have been said or putting them in another way. The review of literature on conversational repair revealed that as an important concept in pragmatic aspect of language, it is an effective strategy to…

The listening comprehension skill is frequently cited by both teachers and learners of a second language (L2) as perhaps the most difficult to deal with in any systematic way. One possible approach is to use the dictogloss task. This involves learners reconstructing a short text they have listened to. Originally developed to draw learners'…

Autism is primarily a social disorder and deficits in social-orienting may be responsible for the failure of children with autism to initiate critical social behaviors. The purpose of this research was to improve the quality of social interactions of children with autism by implementing naturalistic behavior strategies intervention utilizing a…

International instructors in U.S. institutions of higher education boost the academic quality of education available to U.S. undergraduate students. Many university students, however, regard nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants (NNESTAs) as problematic. Innovative programs for enhancing undergraduates' capacity to understand NNESTAs'…

The roles of linguistic, cognitive, and social-pragmatic processes in word learning are well established. If statistical mechanisms also contribute to word learning, they must interact with these processes; however, there exists little evidence for such mechanistic synergy. Adults use co-occurrence statistics to encode speech-object pairings with…

Background: Personal narratives are conditional for victims of sexual abuse to overcome their trauma. Counsellors can help victims with intellectual disability to take an active position in conversations about sexuality and to co-construct a personal narrative. Method: Using discourse and conversational analysis, we studied 4 conversations between…

Several previous studies have investigated the use of questions to facilitate interactions in academic lectures in tertiary education. However, the issue of how disciplinary cultures influence the patterns of questions in lectures has received little attention. Therefore, this study aims to examine the interdisciplinary differences in professors'…

Speakers convey meaning not only through words, but also through gestures. Although children are exposed to co-speech gestures from birth, we do not know how the developing brain comes to connect meaning conveyed in gesture with speech. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to address this question and scanned 8- to 11-year-old…

This article focuses on how kindergarten can encourage children's participation based on the idea of democratic community. The Norwegian Kindergartens Act emphasises children's right to participate and kindergarten is seen as an arena for learning. We discuss planned conversations between pre-school teachers and children during ongoing…

The peripheral manifestations of the inherited neuropathies are increasingly well characterized, but their effects upon cranial nerve function are not well understood. Hearing loss is recognized in a minority of children with this condition, but has not previously been systemically studied. A clear understanding of the prevalence and degree of…

Monolingual English-speaking children in the United States express social preferences for speakers of their native language with a native accent. Here we explore the nature of children's language-based social preferences through research with children in South Africa, a multilingual nation. Like children in the United States, Xhosa South African…

Method: Complete psychometric functions for phoneme and word recognition scores at 8 signal-to-noise ratios from -15 dB to 20 dB were generated for the first 10, 20, and 25, as well as all 50, three-word presentations of the Tri-Word or Computer Assisted Speech Recognition Assessment (CASRA) Test (Gelfand, 1998) based on the results of 12…

The different level of transparency of letter-sound mapping in various orthographies has been found to influence reading development across languages. The Hebrew orthography represents a special case of within language design with two versions of the script, a transparent (vowelized) and an opaque one (unvowelized). In this study we conducted a…