Although significant research has been completed that examines the effectiveness of process drama as a pedagogical approach for developing additional languages and further work has focused on the affordances of digital technologies within drama work, scant attention has been paid to the possibilities which a combination of these approaches might…

Theories of language acquisition have highlighted the importance of adult speakers as active participants in children's language learning. However, in many communities children are reported to be directly engaged by their caregivers only rarely (Lieven, 1994). This observation raises the possibility that these children learn language from…

Joint attention (JA), the ability to share attention to an object or event with another person, is one of the earliest identified deficits in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and directly influences language and social development. There are several effective assessments of JA for young children (e.g., Mundy et al., 2003), but none are appropriate…

Children with autism fail to imitate from an early age and this lack of imitation is a salient diagnostic marker for the disorder. For children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), increased imitation skills appear to be related to increased skill development in a variety of areas. Video modeling was recently validated as a technique to support…

In October, 2011, Age of Learning, Inc., creator of ABCmouse.com "Early Learning Academy" conducted a nationwide survey of 500 kindergarten teachers on the subject of children's preparedness for kindergarten. The survey revealed that two-thirds of America's kindergarten teachers believe most young children are academically unprepared for school…

While Ghanaians in urban and rural settings are multilingual, English is the language of Ghanaian newspapers, politicians, the courts, much of television and radio in the metropolitan centres of the country. Indeed, urban Ghanaian adolescents have expanding opportunities to use English, the only official language of Ghana, even when not in school.…

Intensive Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) training courses for Early Childhood Educators (ECEs) can have a positive effect on their use of interaction strategies that support children's communication skills. The impact of brief SLT training courses is not yet clearly understood. The aims of these two studies were to assess the impact of a brief…

This research identifies strategies that schools have used to raise achievement among white working class pupils in multiracial schools. The methodological approach comprises case studies of schools and focus group interviews to ascertain the views of teachers, parents and children about strategies that worked to raise achievement. The study…

In the current study we investigate whether 2- and 3-year-old German children use intonation productively to mark the informational status of referents. Using a story-telling task, we compared children's and adults' intonational realization via pitch accent (H*, L* and de-accentuation) of New, Given, and Contrastive referents. Both children and…

The "Washington English Language Proficiency Assessment" (WELPA) is a No Child Left Behind (NCLB)-compliant instrument that is used in Grades K-12 as a formal and standardized method of measuring language proficiency. The test results provide important information for classifying English Language Learners (ELLs) and subsequently for…

Oral language competence (skill in everyday talking and listening) is critical in the early years of school in two key respects: it underpins the transition to literacy in the early years, and is the means by which children form and maintain interpersonal relationships in the school setting. In this paper, the role of oral language competence with…

A brief review is provided of recent research on the impact of early visual language exposure on a variety of developmental outcomes, including literacy, cognition, and social adjustment. This body of work points to the great importance of giving young deaf children early exposure to a visual language as a critical precursor to the acquisition of…

The present experimental study was undertaken with three objectives in view, (i) to identify students with language learning disabilities (ii) to develop CAI software to teach LD students through computer-assisted instruction and (iii) to measure the effectiveness of CAI with special reference to LD students. Two matched groups of LD students were…

Research Findings: Grounded in the investment model and informed by the integrative theory of the study of minority children, this study used the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort data set, a nationally representative sample of young children, to investigate whether the association between socioeconomic status (family income and…

This paper reports a quantitative study on gender differences in attitudes when learning oral skills via technology. The study was conducted at Tafila Technical University, Jordan, with 70 female and 30 male students, to find out if female students are better and faster in learning a language than male. Specifically, it seeks to investigate…