"Voyager Passport"[TM] is a supplemental reading intervention system for students in grades K-5. "Voyager Passport Reading Journeys"[TM] is a reading intervention program designed for adolescents who struggle with reading. The "Voyager Universal Literacy System"[R] is a K-3 reading program that includes a core reading…

This report summarizes data on English language learners' academic achievement, English language acquisition, and other school data from 2005-2006 to 2008-2009 school years.

Response to intervention (RTI), the controversial three-tiered, triangular instructional model is getting stretched in new directions by educators who favor holistic, proactive support strategies over formal remediation. A senior scientist at the FPG Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Virginia Buysse…

In general, talking with young children encourages development in many areas: (1) spoken language; (2) early literacy; (3) cognitive development; (4) social skills; and (5) emotional maturity. Speaking with children in increasingly complex and responsive ways does this even better. This article explores research findings about the effects of…

This article provides early childhood practitioners a way to develop a common understanding of the importance of play in the early learning experience of young children. Meaningful discussion among teachers, parents, administrators, and teacher candidates regarding play in early childhood education programs is critical to ensure the growth and…

The relationship between linguistic experience and phonemic representations in spelling was investigated in two groups of Mandarin-English bilingual children (aged 5-6 years) who spoke mostly Mandarin-L1 (n = 23) or mostly English-L1 (n = 27) at home. A 60-item cloze task including high- and low-frequency words with word-initial and word-final…

One of the concerns foreign language teachers may have about using small group (and pair) work is that students will use their shared first language (L1) instead of the target language. This study investigated the effect of learner proficiency pairing and task type on the amount of L1 used by learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in pair…

Major innovations are becoming available for research in language development and disorders. Among these innovations, recent tools allow naturalistic recording in children's homes and automated analysis to facilitate representative sampling. This study employed all-day recordings during the 2nd year of life in a child exposed to three languages,…

There are many kinds of speech and language disorders that can affect children. This fact sheet will present four major areas in which these impairments occur. These are the areas of: (1) Articulation; (2) Fluency; (3) Voice; and (4) Language. Following a brief narrative on a day in the life of a Speech Language Pathologist, this fact sheet…

This article reviews how a receptive, bilingual four-year-old increased her Spanish productive-language skills over five weeks as she engaged in Spanish-language play sessions with bilingual peers. The data show her growing participation in group verbal interactions along with her growing production of her weaker language. In addition, a…

Matching-to-sample and sequence training procedures were used to develop responding to stimulus classes that were considered analogous to 3 aspects of verbal behavior: identifying synonyms and parts of speech,and using syntax. Matching-to-sample procedures were used to train 12 paired associates from among 24 stimuli. These pairs were analogous to…

Word segmentation, that is, discovering the boundaries between words that are embedded in a continuous speech stream, is an important faculty for language learners; humans solve this task partly by calculating transitional probabilities between sounds. Behavioral and ERP studies suggest that detection of sequential probabilities (statistical…

Five experiments examined whether overt repetition (i.e., saying a word aloud) during exposure is critical to the expressive learning of new words. When participants did not engage in overt repetition during exposure, they nevertheless exhibited clear expressive learning, both with and without an accompanying semantics, indicating that overt…

When mobile organisms are spatially disoriented, for instance by rapid repetitive movement, they must re-establish orientation. Past research has shown that the geometry of enclosing spaces is consistently used for reorientation by a wide variety of species, but that non-geometric features are not always used. Based on these findings, some…

This paper investigates the development of relative clauses in the speech of one German-speaking child aged 2 ; 0 to 5 ; 0. The earliest relative clauses we found in the data occur in topicalization constructions that are only a little different from simple sentences: they contain a single proposition, express the actor prior to other…