This study aimed at investigating the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic period on the language development of preschool children according to the opinions of teachers. A qualitative case study design was adopted, with data obtained from preschool teachers (N=21) working in independent kindergartens, kindergartens within primary schools, and private…

Background: The use of mediated learning in cognitive training has been shown to be effective in enhancing students' cognitive development. Nonetheless, its effects on language development are less explored. Aims: This study examined the effects of an early cognitive intervention (Think Bright program) in enhancing the cognitive and language…

This study is a corpus study on morphological features of children's books in Turkish. The purpose of the study is to determine derivational and inflectional suffixes in Turkish children books and to identify the common and productive morphemes used in child literature in the light of the information obtained; hence, reach clues about determining…

The practice of narrow listening was introduced almost 30 years ago (Krashen, 1996), but has not received enough attention from English language teachers and researchers. Past research has placed a focus on the combination of this method and narrow reading, or the use of this method in teaching languages other than English. This study explored…

In the current study, we examined the role of first-language (L1) influence on the additional-language development of grammatical gender marking in Spanish. The participants were L1 speakers of English or French (N = 215), who were learning Spanish and who were at three instructional levels. The data came from their use of gender marking in…

Cummins (2018) argued that "emergent bilingual students struggle, often unsuccessfully, to escape from the externally imposed identity cocoon within which they find themselves" (p. x). This struggle leads to negative views and deficit thinking approaches to educating these students. In today's educational context, meeting the cognitive…

Research on "parentese," the acoustically exaggerated, slower, and higher-pitched speech directed toward infants, has mostly focused on maternal contributions, although it has long been known that fathers also produce parentese. Given recent societal changes in family dynamics, it is necessary to revise these mother-centered models of…

There is a great deal of variability in how families read and interact with picture books. To understand why reading practices may (or may not) relate to language outcomes, a necessary step to understand what occurs in the home. The goal of this work is to better understand the frequency and nature of picture book reading at home with children…

Language delay impacts children's social development. Game-based teaching has shown promise in enhancing language skills, however, the effectiveness of digital game-based teaching for children with language delay remains underexplored. This study, focusing on Chinese kindergarten students, investigated the impact of digital game-based teaching…

While it is widely accepted that language teachers require knowledge of second language acquisition (SLA) (Richards, 2010), what about content teachers, who are increasingly required to help develop their learners' academic language proficiency? How much do they need to know about SLA theories and how can they acquire such knowledge and expertise?…

This paper reports on the process of developing an original framework for conceptualising and measuring language learner well-being within the context of heritage language (HL) learning. Drawing on a quantitative validation study with 545 young Chinese heritage language (CHL) learners, aged 7-18, in the UK, this paper presents an empirically…

Verbal interactions between children and educators can support the language development of preschoolers when conversations are of high quality. Educators' conversations with preschoolers are known to be responsive, but they are not always sufficiently complex. Educators' talk and topics may be too simple to propel preschoolers' oral language…

Purpose: A rich body of evidence has illuminated the importance of caregivers' use of prosody in facilitating young children's language development. Although caregiver-child shared reading has been repeatedly linked to children's language skills, caregiver prosody during shared reading interactions (i.e., oral reading expressiveness) has been…

A strong predictor of children's language is performance on non-word repetition (NWR) tasks. However, the basis of this relationship remains unknown. Some suggest that NWR tasks measure phonological working memory, which then affects language growth. Others argue that children's knowledge of language/language experience affects NWR performance. A…

Second language (L2) grammar learning is difficult. Two frameworks--the psycholinguistic lexical bottleneck hypothesis and the neurocognitive declarative/procedural model--predict that faster L2 lexical processing should facilitate L2 incidental grammar learning. We tested these predictions in a pretest-posttest syntactic adaptation study of…