This study examined the viability of the Sentence Verification Technique (SVT; Royer, Hastings, & Hook, 1979) assessment tool as a curriculum-based measure of science content learning. Its perceived compatibility with statewide accountability test expectations made SVT a candidate for use in content-focused response to intervention frameworks.…

This qualitative research study examined 13 preschool to third-grade teachers' experiences reading and discussing culturally relevant texts (CRTs) with their students. Teachers worked at four schools in a large urban school district and with child populations from different sociocultural and linguistic backgrounds. We employed provisional and…

The effects of repeated oral reading and timed reading on L2 oral reading fluency were examined among Japanese university students (N = 50) over 12 weeks. Three quasi-experimental groups were used in the study. Group 1 practiced two types of reading: Repeated oral reading with chunking practice and timed reading. Group 2 did timed reading only.…

This study aims to gain a better understanding of the Finnish national curriculum reform by examining how the educational practitioners, at the district level, orchestrate the shared sense-making concerning the reform work in their school districts. Qualitative focus group data was collected from 12 groups, throughout Finland, that were…

Learning to be literate builds upon existing knowledge of the language from speech. Becoming literate then enables children to learn more about language. However, literacy is unlikely to be achieved without explicit and prolonged instruction. This review provides an evidence base for decision-making during literacy education. The authors identify…

The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) examines what students know in reading, mathematics and science, and what they can do with what they know. It provides the most comprehensive and rigorous international assessment of student learning outcomes to date. Results from PISA indicate the quality and equity of learning…

The amount of second language (L2) use has significant influence on native speakers' comprehension of L2 learners' speech. Nonetheless, few empirical studies examine how differences in the amount of language use affect the intelligibility and comprehensibility of nonnative speakers' reading and spontaneous speech. This study aims to contribute to…

The present research investigated the role of familiarity and proximity in infants' comprehension of displaced speech. When 13-and 16-month-old infants heard a researcher talk about a familiar person immediately after she left the room, they showed comprehension of the name by looking, pointing, or searching for the person in question. The…

We report 2 experiments using a sentence--picture matching task concerned with the interpretation of prepositional phrases that were ambiguous between high and low attachment (Branigan, Pickering, & McLean, 2005). After reading a prime sentence with a particular interpretation, participants tended to interpret an ambiguous prepositional phrase…

In this paper I shall present and develop my organisational language, "social activity method" (SAM), and illustrate some of its applications. I shall introduce a new scheme for "modes of recontextualisation" that enables the analysis of the ways in which one activity--which might be school mathematics or social research or any…

The research examined relational processing following stroke. Stroke patients (14 with frontal, 30 with non-frontal lesions) and 41 matched controls completed four relational processing tasks: sentence comprehension, Latin square matrix completion, modified Dimensional Change Card Sorting, and n-back. Each task included items at two or three…

Few studies report on therapy to improve language comprehension in children with specific language impairment (SLI). We address this gap by measuring the effect of a systematic intervention to improve inferential comprehension using dialogic reading tasks in conjunction with pre-determined questions and cues. Sixteen children with a diagnosis of…

I discuss a teaching experiment that sought to characterize precalculus students' angle measure understandings. The study's findings indicate that the students initially conceived angle measures in terms of geometric objects. As the study progressed, the students formed more robust understandings of degree and radian measures by constructing an…

Purpose: In this study, the authors assessed the hypothesis of a limitation in attentional allocation capacity as underlying poor sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: Fifteen children with SLI, 15 age-matched controls, and 15 grammar-matched controls participated in the study. Sixty sentences were…

The Watson-Barker Listening Test (WBLT) is one of the most popular measures of listening comprehension. However, participants in studies utilizing this scale have been almost exclusively Anglo-American. At the same time, previous research questions the psychometric properties of the test. This study addressed both of these issues by testing the…