Although not a new discussion in the Irish context, the value of oral language development has recently gained prominence again in Irish Post-Primary English classrooms. In this article we present how the recent introduction of Junior Cycle English, which now includes an Oral Communication Classroom Based Assessment () is renewing efforts to…

Theories of writing development posit several component skills as necessary to the writing process. This meta-analysis synthesizes the literature on the correlation between these proposed component skills and writing outcomes. Specifically, this study examines the bivariate relationship of handwriting fluency, spelling, reading, and oral language…

The nature of a specific spoken language as well as its orthography and the close relation between these two characteristics may influence phonemic awareness development (Durgunoglu & Öney, 1999). In this respect, oral language proficiency of bilingual and monolingual children appears to have an influence on enhancing their phonological…

Practitioners as well as language approach and language development scholars need to work together to create an environment in which research-based learning methods can be put into practice with developmentally appropriate content. Inadequate attention has been given to the crucial language skills that underpin children's language and literacy…

Educators aspire to use the most effective teaching materials possible. Their choices, ideally, should be informed by empirical evidence on how materials they use can affect students' outcomes or performance, particularly their post-instruction performance or application. The current research tested the extent to which voice (active vs. passive)…

This study explored deaf and hearing university students' metacognitive awareness with regard to comprehension difficulties during reading and classroom instruction. Utilising the Reading Awareness Inventory (Milholic, V. 1994. "An inventory to pique students' metacognitive awareness of reading strategies." "Journal of Reading"…

In two eye-tracking experiments we examined whether wider discourse information helps the recognition of reduced pronunciations (e.g., "puter") more than the recognition of canonical pronunciations of spoken words (e.g., "computer"). Dutch participants listened to sentences from a casual speech corpus containing canonical and reduced target words.…

Reading a word may involve the spoken language in two ways: in the conversion of letters to phonemes according to the conventions of the language's writing system and the assimilation of phonemes according to the language's constraints on speaking. If so, then words that require assimilation when uttered would require a change in the phonemes…

People with high-functioning Autism (HFA) can accurately identify social categories from speech, but they have more difficulty connecting linguistic variation in the speech signal to social stereotypes associated with those categories. In the current study, the perception and evaluation of talker age by young adults with HFA was examined. The…

In examining how English as a second language (ESL) learners process English formulaic expressions in a nonnative English context, this study aims to investigate the strategies that learners use and how first language (L1) culture and conceptual knowledge could influence the use of the strategies. This study is guided by the research question of…

Through an in-depth analysis of quantitative and qualitative data, this article offers a case study of the advantages and challenges in the application of the flipped learning approach in the instruction of Chinese as a foreign language at the beginning level. Data were collected from two first-year Chinese classes (one in traditional and the…

Teaching and learning a foreign language at a distance implies many challenges, namely regarding oral skills. At Universidade Aberta (the Portuguese Open University), and taking into account its virtual pedagogical model (Pereira, 2007) and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Alves, 2001), we suggest curricular paths which…

This study identified robust predictors of expressive skills in academic English as a foreign language. The participants were 92 Korean-speaking learners of English. The field test of the Pearson Test of English Academic was used as a secondary data analysis. Four communicative skills (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) and six enabling…

This article reports on collaborative action research in twelve northern rural and Indigenous communities in four Canadian provinces. Pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, grade one, and Aboriginal Head Start teachers worked with university researchers in three universities to create action research projects with the aim of supporting children's oral…

Young adults in South Korea are encouraged to constantly develop their skills and qualifications to meet the challenges posed by the job market in the country's neoliberal post-IMF crisis economy. This paper examines the ways in which changes in South Korea's labor market and corporate recruitment culture have affected the ideologies and practices…