Feedback on student work is problematic for faculty and students in British higher education. Evaluation feedback takes faculty much time to produce and students are often dissatisfied with its quantity, timing, and clarity. The Sounds Good project has been experimenting with the use of digital audio for feedback, aiming to save faculty time and…

Students that use augmentative communication often have a hard time breaking into conversations, initiating conversations and then being able to sustain a conversation. Students that use augmentative communication (ACC) need training in not only the use of the machine but in social communication rules, and in strategies on how to bypass…

The purpose of this quasi-experimental study was to determine if upper-level college students who participated in AgPAQ, an integrated course cluster learning community, would demonstrate enhanced learning in the areas of oral communication, written communication, and agronomic/economic technical content knowledge. The population (N = 182)…

This study investigates ESL learners' semantic awareness of English words by attempting to estimate a threshold beyond which ESL learners can be said to have reached native-like semantic knowledge. The "Vocabulary Levels Test," originally designed by Nation (1990) and later revised and expanded by Schmitt (2000), was used to operationalise this…

This study examined the relationship between viewing an infant DVD and expressive and receptive language outcomes. Children between 12 and 15 months were randomly assigned to view "Baby Wordsworth," a DVD highlighting words around the house marketed for children beginning at 12 months of age. Viewings took place in home settings over 6 weeks.…

Speech and language difficulties can be indicative of other cognitive, social and developmental problems. Tools used in the UK have not (1) targeted two-year-old children, (2) included both parents' reports and independent observations, and (3) simultaneously evaluated expression, understanding and speech. This cross-sectional study of two…

Speech perception deficits in developmental dyslexia were investigated in quiet and various noise conditions. Dyslexics exhibited clear speech perception deficits in noise but not in silence. "Place-of-articulation" was more affected than "voicing" or "manner-of-articulation." Speech-perception-in-noise deficits persisted when performance of…

This article investigates the acquisition of the focus particle "auch" "also" by German-learning children. We report data from spontaneous and elicited production of utterances with the focus particle "auch" by 1- to 4-year-olds complementing earlier findings of a delayed production of the unaccented "auch" compared to the accented one. But in…

Using a standardized assessment instrument, the authors compared 182 adults with congenital deaf-blindness and those with acquired deaf-blindness. They found that those with congenital deaf-blindness were more likely to have impairments in cognition, activities of daily living, and social interactions and were less likely to use speech for…

Despite nonnative English-speaking teachers' (NNESTs) professional qualifications and increasing contributions to research in TESOL, the native speaker (NS) myth (Phillipson, 1992) continues to undermine these teachers' sense of professional legitimacy and pedagogical efficacy. Thus, due in great part to the notion of an idealized NS teacher of…

This study examines the production and reduction patterns of initial /s/ clusters by Hebrew-speaking children with phonological disorders. Data were collected from 30 children with phonological disorders between the ages of 3;5-5;2. The data were elicited by means of a picture-naming task combined with a sentence completion task. Target words…

Well-documented Romance-Germanic differences in the use of accent in speech to convey information-structure and focus cause problems for the assessment of prosodic skills in populations with clinical disorders. The strategies for assessing the ability to use lexical and contrastive accent in English and Spanish are reviewed, and studies in the…

Spanish-speaking, Mexican American parents participated in a literacy workshop in which they created short, personal letters called "cartitas de carino" for their children. This paper reports on the content of their texts, which included drawings and messages that reflected the cultural norms and traditions of the families. Using a…

Age-normed tests of listening comprehension, oral expression, reading comprehension, and written expression were administered in Grades 1 (n = 128), 3, and 5, or 3 (n = 113), 5, and 7. Confirmatory factor analyses compared 1- and 4-factor models at each grade level and supported a 4-factor model of language by ear, mouth, eye, and hand. Multiple…

This research project examines the way that children and parents talk about science outside of school and, specifically, how they show distributed expertise about biological topics during visits to a science center. We adopt a theoretical framework that looks at learning on three interweaving planes: individual, social, and cultural (tools,…