Purpose: This archival study examined the relationship between the speech sound production skill of kindergarten children and literacy outcomes in Grades 1-3 in a data set where most children's vocabulary skills were within normal limits, speech therapy was not provided until 2nd grade, and phonological awareness instruction was discouraged at the…

This study describes the language proficiency and early literacy skills of Cantonese-speaking English language learners (ELLs) in kindergarten. A total of 113 Cantonese-speaking kindergarteners in Canada and the United States, composed of three subsamples from three different locations participated in this study. Results showed that on average,…

This study examines the associations between the speaking proficiency of 181 adult learners of Dutch as a second language and their linguistic competences. Performance in eight speaking tasks was rated on a scale of communicative adequacy. After extrapolation of these ratings to the Overall Oral Production scale of the Common European Framework of…

Based on appreciative inquiry and threshold concepts from an intercultural learning perspective, the article makes insights into the constructivist social learning practice of Estonian language learning amongst Russian-speaking teachers in Estonia. The application of educational action research methodology, more specifically that of Bridget…

More than 500 people from across the country attended the Campaigning Alliance for Lifelong Learning's February lobby of Parliament. They made sure their voices were heard, lobbying their MPs and ensuring politicians from all parties got the message that the loss of over a million adult learning places is unacceptable. This article describes the…

In the current paper, we asked at what level in the speech planning process speakers retrieve stored syllables. There is evidence that syllable structure plays an essential role in the phonological encoding of words (e.g., online syllabification and phonological word formation). There is also evidence that syllables are retrieved as whole units.…

Though considerable progress has been made in developing techniques for improving the acquisition of expressive verbal communication in children with autism, research has documented that 10-25% still fail to develop speech. One possible technique that could be significant in facilitating responding for this nonverbal subgroup of children is the…

This paper describes a study in which Systemic Functional Linguistics was applied to describe how people who stutter use language. The aim of the study was to determine and describe any differences in language use between a group of 10 adults who stutter and 10 matched normally-fluent speakers. In addition to formal linguistic analyses, analyses…

The scripts of 318 movies were analyzed in this study to determine the vocabulary size necessary to understand 95% and 98% of the words in movies. The movies consisted of 2,841,887 running words and had a total running time of 601 hours and 33 minutes. The movies were classified as either American or British, and then put into the following…

While reading the articles assembled in this volume, one cannot help asking "Why gestures?" What's all the fuss about them? In the last few years, the fuss is, indeed, considerable, and not just here, in this special issue, but also in research on learning and teaching at large. What changed? After all, gestures have been around ever since the…

The number of students with disabilities arriving on college and university campuses is increasing. Of those students reporting a disability, over half of them state they have a learning disability. Unlike high school, the burden is on the student in college to demonstrate the need for services and communicate this need to the institution in a…

This dissertation explores the phenomenon of "ways of speaking" in the Nanti speech community of Montetoni, in southeastern Peruvian Amazonia, between 1999 and 2009. In the context of this study, a way of speaking is a socially meaningful, conventionalized sound pattern, manifest at the level of the utterance, that expresses the…

A systematic social skills training intervention to teach reciprocal sharing was designed and implemented with triads of preschool-age children, including one child with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and two untrained classroom peers who had no delays or disabilities. A multiple-baseline research design was used to evaluate effects of the…

This article reports on an investigation of echolalic repetition in Alzheimer's disease (AD). A qualitative analysis of data from spontaneous conversations with MHI, a woman with AD, is presented. The data come from the DALI Corpus, a corpus of spontaneous conversations involving subjects with AD. This study argues that echolalic effects can be…

This study focused on training students in skills essential to making oral presentations based on original and independent research work as part of their English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course. As a result of the training, students showed an increase in the successful use of research-related skills and a great improvement in their ability to…