Purpose: This study evaluated the efficacy of a collaborative intervention where a speech-language pathologist (SLP) trained mainstream secondary school teachers to make modifications to their oral and written instructional language. The trained teachers' uptake of techniques in their whole-class teaching practices and the impact this had on the…

Foreign language anxiety is a psychological factor that may crucially affect student performance. Although many researchers have investigated the effect of anxiety, few have studied listening comprehension. In particular, listening anxiety among language teachers has yet to be examined. This article reports the results of a study on foreign…

Preschool children typically do not learn words from ignorant or unreliable speakers. Here, we examined the mechanism by which these learning failures occur by modifying the comprehension test procedure that measures word learning. Following lexical training by a knowledgeable or ignorant speaker, 48 preschool-aged children were asked either a…

This paper evaluates the effect of differing amounts of schooling on outcomes of lower secondary education. Two groups of German academic track students are compared who chose English as either their first (EFFL; "n" = 2,771) or second (ESFL; "n" = 345) foreign language throughout secondary school. While EFFL students receive…

This study describes an evaluation of a read aloud intervention to improve comprehension and vocabulary of first-grade students. Twelve teachers were randomly assigned to an intervention or comparison condition. The study lasted 19 weeks, and the intervention focused on the systematic use of narrative and expository texts and dialogic interactions…

In this two-year longitudinal study, we sought to examine the developmental relationships among early narrative listening comprehension and language skills (i.e., vocabulary knowledge, sentence memory, and phonological awareness) and the roles of these factors in predicting narrative listening comprehension at the age of 6 years. We also sought to…

Using nationally-representative, longitudinal data on a cohort of Spanish-speaking English language learners in the U.S., this study investigated the extent to which early oral language proficiency in Spanish and English predicts later levels and rates of growth in English reading. Latent growth models indicated that both Spanish and English…

Purpose: The authors evaluated the installation and use of sound-field systems to investigate the impact of these systems on teaching and learning in elementary school classrooms. Methods: The evaluation included acoustic surveys of classrooms, questionnaire surveys of students and teachers, and experimental testing of students with and without…

This longitudinal study compared the development of oral language and more specifically narrative skills (storytelling and story retelling) in children with specific language impairment (SLI) with and without literacy delay. Therefore, 18 children with SLI and 18 matched controls with normal literacy were followed from the last year of…

This study investigated the adequacy of an expanded simple view of reading (SVR) framework for English language learners (ELLs), using mediation modeling approach. The proposed expanded SVR included reading fluency as an outcome and phonological awareness and naming speed as predictors. To test the fit of the proposed mediation model, longitudinal…

This study investigated relations between preschool talk exposure and immigrant first graders' second language literacy and oral skills outcomes. Participants in the study were 25 children with Turkish as their first language and Norwegian as their second, attending various multilingual and ethnically diverse preschool classrooms in Norway and…

The aim of this study was to investigate the suitability of different measures of listening comprehension for Years 2, 3 and 4 children with English as an additional language (EAL). Non-standardised uses of reading comprehension measures are often employed as proxy measures of listening comprehension, i.e. for purposes for which they were not…

Video is widely used in the teaching of L2 listening, and SLA researchers have argued that the visual components of spoken texts are useful for the listener in comprehending aural information. Yet video texts are rarely used on tests of L2 listening ability, perhaps in part due to the belief that including the visual channel involves assessing…

Mobile devices have become a significant part of students' lives. The average number of hours that college students reported using their smartphones each day was nine hours--more than half of their daily waking hours (Roberts, Yaya, & Manolis, 2014). Although software developers and teachers have started to develop and incorporate various…

Researchers debate whether listening tasks should be supported by visuals. Most empirical research in this area has been conducted on the effects of visual support on listening comprehension tasks employing multiple-choice questions. The present study seeks to expand this research by investigating the effects of video listening passages (vs.…