Literacy is increasingly essential for Americans' health, economic well-being, civic engagement, access to higher education, and social participation. Rapid growth in technology and globalization have increased demand for both universal literacy and higher levels of literacy than in the recent past. Yet national and international assessments…

The population of Spanish-speaking preschoolers in the United States continues to increase and there is a significant need to develop psychometrically sound early language and literacy screening measures to accurately capture children's ability in Spanish. In this paper, we describe the innovative design and calibration process of the new…

A large body studies into individual differences in second language learning has shown that success in second language learning is strongly affected by a set of relevant learner characteristics ranging from the age of onset to motivation, aptitude, and personality. Most studies have concentrated on a limited number of learner characteristics and…

Listening is a very crucial skill to be learnt in second language classroom because it is essential for the development of spoken language proficiency (Hamouda, 2013). The aim of this study is to investigate the significant differences in terms of students' performance when using traditional (audio-only) method and video media method. The data of…

Since Gardner introduced the importance of motivation on Language 2 learning, the concept has been accompanied with three more relevant concepts; amotivation, demotivation and remotivation. This paper mainly focused on high school students' de-motivation and remotivation in English. De-motivation is a set of factors which decreases the motivation…

This study explores ways in which university science courses can be infused with opportunities for pre-service teachers to design student student interactions that promote language development and content mastery. Participants included bilingual pre-service teachers enrolled in an elementary science approaches course and its school-based fieldwork…

Sixty-seven Japanese English as a Second Language undergraduate learners completed one smartphone video production per week for 12 weeks, based on a teacher-selected theme. Designed as a case study for this specific context, data from students' oral performances was analyzed on a weekly basis for their use of the Academic Word List (AWL). A…

This article explores the identities of a group of elementary teachers who participated in a professional development (PD) project on multilingual language learners. We study how the participating teachers drew on different aspects of their identities to respond to encouragement to increase their attention to students' diverse multilingual…

We investigated direct and indirect effects of component skills on writing (DIEW) using data from 193 children in Grade 1. In this model, working memory was hypothesized to be a foundational cognitive ability for language and cognitive skills as well as transcription skills, which, in turn, contribute to writing. Foundational oral language skills…

Adjectives, like nouns and verbs, are one of the three major classes of lexical words. But, unlike nouns and verbs, they emerge late in acquisition. In Catalan, as in many other languages, their use is closely linked to the literate lexicon learned at school-age. Thus, the use of adjectives can be a good indicator of later language development.…

The purpose of this exploratory longitudinal study was to evaluate the efficacy of two new forms of recasts (i.e., elaborated and paraphrased recasts), each of which was designed to be more in accordance with contested views of input processing. The effectiveness of the two new forms of recasts was compared to that of conventional standard…

The purpose of this interdisciplinary study was to explore the impacts of tablet technology in a college classroom on students' perceptions of their own learning. Students were asked about oral, written, and graphical communication and critical thinking skills. Mid-semester and end-of-semester surveys were administered to tablet-enabled classes…

There is growing evidence of systematic underachievement of South African primary school learners in reading in English as the first additional language. There is a small but growing literature that provides insights, that is, causes, patterns and prevalence, into this phenomenon. Through a secondary analysis of a spelling component of a literacy…

Collaborative output has been found to facilitate L2 lexical learning due to the cognitive word processing engendered in it. Yet it is not clear how interactions involved in collaborative output could affect learners' word processing and hence their lexical learning. This paper takes a sociocultural perspective to investigate Chinese EFL learners'…

We investigated direct and indirect effects of component skills on writing (DIEW) using data from 193 children in Grade 1. In this model, working memory was hypothesized to be a foundational cognitive ability for language and cognitive skills as well as transcription skills, which, in turn, contribute to writing. Foundational oral language skills…