The research studied the effectiveness of the integration of Facebook as a flexible ubiquitous learning space into the educational process for speaking skills development of undergraduate students learning English as a second language. For this purpose teaching was organised via a specially created and moderated Facebook group where various media…

The present study investigated the effects of lexical age of acquisition (AoA), phonological complexity, age and expressive vocabulary on spoken word variability and accuracy in typically developing infants, aged 1;9-3;1. It was hypothesized that later-acquired words and those with more complex speech sounds would be produced more variably and…

This study determined the effectiveness of an experimental emergent literacy intervention, targeting teenage mothers attending an educational facility. Using a pretest/posttest research design, 27 participants completed a 7­-week intervention based in the classroom, targeting a range of emergent literacy skills that they could utilize when reading…

Typically-developing (TD) children frequently refer to objects uniquely in gesture. Parents translate these gestures into words, facilitating children's acquisition of these words (Goldin-Meadow et al. in "Dev Sci" 10(6):778-785, 2007). We ask whether this pattern holds for children with autism (AU) and with Down syndrome (DS) who show…

Diversity of key consonants used in communication (DKCC) is a value-added predictor of expressive language growth in initially preverbal children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Studying the predictors of DKCC growth in young children with ASD might inform treatment of this under-studied aspect of prelinguistic development. Eighty-seven…

The goal of this study was to examine the extent to which the content and recommendations in recently published early language and literacy methods textbooks may support early childhood teachers in learning to provide vocabulary instruction for young children. We completed a content analysis of 9 textbooks with coding at the sentence level.…

Dynamic Assessment (DA) has received a considerable amount of attention in the educational sciences and beyond. DA combines instruction or feedback with assessment or testing within a single activity. DA has great potential for classroom practices, but has not been implemented in many classrooms yet. In this article, we argue that teacher…

Background: This study aimed to compare developmental courses of structural and pragmatic language skills in school-aged children with Williams syndrome (WS) and children with idiopathic intellectual disability (IID). Comparison of these language trajectories could highlight syndrome-specific developmental features. Method: Twelve monolingual…

Service-Learning (SL) has been defined as an experiential teaching methodology. Through SL, students participate in activities that benefit their community and enhance their learning experience. In the current study, Spanish as a second language (L2) and heritage language learners (HLLs) engaged in a SL project in which they translated English…

A limited vocabulary is a substantial obstacle to success in reading comprehension (Graves, 2004). A morphemic approach to vocabulary instruction may be an effective method for increasing student outcomes in both word knowledge and reading comprehension (Kuo & Anderson, 2006; Reed, 2008). The purpose of this research was to examine the effects…

The study developed an adaptive computer-assisted reading system and investigated its effect on promoting English as a foreign language learner-readers' contextual vocabulary learning performance. Seventy Taiwanese college students were assigned to two reading groups. Participants in the customised reading group read online English texts, each of…

4 Corners Vocabulary Charts (FCVCs) are explored as a multipurpose vehicle for processing academic language in a 5th-grade classroom. FCVCs typically display a vocabulary word, an illustration of the word, synonyms associated with the word, a sentence using a given vocabulary word, and a definition of the term in students' words. The use of…

The purpose of this article is to describe how an elementary art specialist scaffolded learning of specific academic vocabulary during a unit on how to create hollow clay ceramic sculptures. Although much has been written recently on how elementary teachers might better teach academic vocabulary in reading and language arts contexts as well as in…

University lecturers share a concern for incoming varsity students who lack the literacy competence to succeed in their courses. Given the strong correlation between reading and literacy, the English Department commenced an innovative and effective reading programme which witnessed positive and enthusiastic results. By engaging students in reading…

The revised hierarchical model seems different from the distributed conceptual feature model in predicting how unbalanced bilinguals would be aware of semantic relations between words for taxonomic categories of basic level (exemplar words) and words for those of superordinate level (category names) in L2. We did a series of four experiments to…