This article outlines the efforts toward racial equity undertaken at the system level in Basic Education for Adults (BEdA) programs in Washington state. These Title II Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) programs include both adult basic education and English language acquisition (ABE/ELA) students. The work focuses on the alignment of…

Purpose: We report on a replicated single-case design study that measured the feasibility of an expressive vocabulary intervention for three Cantonese-speaking toddlers with small expressive lexicons relative to their age. The aim was to assess the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic feasibility of an intervention method developed for…

Purpose: This article explored the predictive values of three main language delay (LD) trajectories (i.e., persistent, late onset, and transient) across 3-5 years on poor literacy at 8 years. Additionally, the effect of gender was assessed, using both gender-neutral and gender-specific thresholds. Method: The data comprised mother-reported…

Guided by an ecological model, we tested whether teacher-child interaction quality buffered the negative associations between challenging behavior within preschool classroom contexts and language and literacy skills. Associations were examined for a sample of children enrolled an urban Head Start program (N = 304 children across 53 classrooms).…

In recent years, developing communication skills is the main goal of foreign language learning, so the most effective way of developing this skill is to expose the learners to real life situations. Movies provide exposures to real language, used in authentic settings and in the cultural context. Movies are the most effective audiovisual materials…

Previous work has shown that heritage grammars are often simplified compared to their monolingual counterparts, especially in domains in which the societally-dominant language makes fewer distinctions than the heritage language. We investigated whether linguistic simplification extended to the anaphoric system of Turkish heritage speakers living…

While current debates oppose the cochlear implant's privileging of speech acquisition to teaching sign language, nineteenth-century debates, in contrast, opposed those who saw sign language as a tool for learning to read and write, and those who saw in it an autonomous language for organizing thought itself. Should the order of gestural signs…

When taught a label for an object, and later asked whether that object or a novel object is the referent of a novel label, preschoolers favor the novel object. This article examines whether this so-called disambiguation effect may be undermined by an expectation to communicate about a discovery. This expectation may explain why 4-year-olds do not…

What aspects of infants' prelinguistic communication are most valuable for learning to speak, and why? We test whether early vocalizations and gestures drive the transition to word use because, in addition to indicating motoric readiness, they (a) are early instances of intentional communication and (b) elicit verbal responses from caregivers. In…

Heritage languages (HLs) are acquired in contexts of unbalanced input, or situations in which children receive primary exposure to the family/HL and experience an abrupt shift after the child begins formal schooling. As a consequence, HL speakers normally become more dominant in the environmental language, while the development of the HL is…

The aim of this research was to assess global and socio-emotional development and infant's language of caregivers by means of the third edition of Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development. Literature points peculiarities on the institutional setting and that presence or absence of mother can impact infant's development in several forms.…

Current conversations about children's literacy have focused on the need for more phonics and decoding instruction and have sidelined the importance of children's language development, argues George Hruby. Language development involves more than the ability to decode written language. The ability to understand the meaning of those words is also…

Parental reports are a widely-used source of information about infants' and toddlers' communicative skills, but parent-report instruments valid for children older than 30 months are less known. This study explored individual variability in children's communicative skills at the age of 3;0 via parental reports using the Estonian (E) CDI-III. The…

It is widely accepted that assessment plays a role in monitoring the development of young children with special needs in early intervention/early childhood settings. The process of assessing young children's language skills often looks for delays within a solid language foundation. However, many children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) may…

Objective: The aim of the study was to conduct a meta-analysis of research examining the early speech and language functioning of young children, birth to age 8;11 (years;months), with nonsyndromic cleft lip and/or palate (NSCL/P) compared to their peers without NSCL/P. Method: We conducted a random-effects metaregression using 241 effect sizes…