This study aims to investigate preschool staff's view of emergent literacy approaches in Swedish preschools with the following research question: How do preschool staff describe and explain the approaches they use in the emergent literacy environment of preschool? Focus-group interviews were conducted with 52 participating preschool units.…

Purpose: In the new mandatory National Preschool Curriculum Standards introduced by the Ministry of Education Malaysia, the play-based approach has been emphasized in the teaching and learning process. This study aimed to find out teachers' perception towards the use of the play-based approach in the language and literacy development of…

Vocabulary knowledge is a critical component of school readiness. The current study investigated the extent to which low levels of joint attention in infancy and parent-child book reading across early childhood increase the risk of children having poor vocabulary around the time of school entry. Relevant data from the Longitudinal Study of…

This study explores Korean-immigrant parents' language ideologies and practices with respect to their American-born children's language development. Participants were seven ethnic Korean families composed of immigrant parents and their American-born children, aged between five and seven, in Midwestern America. Interviews in the medium of Korean…

Purpose: The authors examined longitudinal associations between 2 categories of parent verbal responsiveness and language comprehension and production 1 year later in 40 toddlers and preschoolers with a diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Method: Parent-child play samples using a standard toy set were digitally captured and coded for…

Hearing impairment is an exceptional circumstance that restricts the child's ability to communicate verbally. Depression is a common stress-related response for hearing parents of children with hearing loss. Evidence suggests that mothers are more inclined than fathers to experience depression in response to their child's hearing loss (Mavrolas,…

Elucidating the neural basis of joint attention in infancy promises to yield important insights into the development of language and social cognition, and directly informs developmental models of autism. We describe a new method for evaluating responding to joint attention performance in infancy that highlights the 9- to 10-month period as a time…

Research into multilingualism and personality has shown that a majority of multilinguals report feeling different when they switch from one language to another. The present study looks at perceived shifts on five scales of feelings (feeling logical, serious, emotional, fake and different) in pair-wise comparisons between languages following the…

This study examines the relationship between delivery models (the class size reduction model and the sheltered instruction model) and language development levels on the grade-level reading development of sixth-grade English learners (ELs) attending public middle schools in metro Atlanta, Georgia. The instrument used to measure grade-level mastery…

Current research shows that, despite standards-based mathematics reform, American students lag behind in mathematics achievement when compared to their counterparts in other countries. The purpose of this mixed methods study was to examine if reading level, as measured by the Scholastic Reading Inventory, is related to standards-based mathematics…

We studied how gesture use changes with culture, age and increased spoken language competence. A picture-naming task was presented to British (N = 80) and Finnish (N = 41) typically developing children aged 2-5 years. British children were found to gesture more than Finnish children and, in both cultures, gesture production decreased after the age…

Providing a comprehensive survey of cutting-edge work on second language learning, this "Handbook," written by a team of leading experts, surveys the nature of second language learning and its implications for teaching. Prominent theories and methods from linguistics, psycholinguistics, processing-based, and cognitive approaches are…

A randomized control intervention study was conducted to evaluate the effects of the highly structured Heidelberg Parent-Based Language Intervention (HPLI). The outcomes of 43 children (n = 23 intervention, n = 20 control) who had been identified as late talkers during routine developmental check-ups carried out in pediatric practices at the age…

In the Storyline approach, a fictive world is created in the classroom, with learners working in small groups, taking on the role of characters in a story. The story develops as they work on a range of tasks which integrate the practical and theoretical content of the curriculum. This article reports on a study based on the syllabus for English,…

This study investigated the long-term effects of structural priming on children's use of indirect speech clauses in a narrative context. Forty-two monolingual English-speaking 5-year-olds in two primary classrooms took part in a story-retelling task including reported speech. Testing took place in three individual sessions (pre-test, post-test 1,…