Background: Poor comprehenders have difficulty comprehending connected text, despite having age-appropriate levels of reading accuracy and fluency. We used a longitudinal design to examine earlier reading and language skills in children identified as poor comprehenders in mid-childhood. Method: Two hundred and forty-two children began the study at…

The technological and social/cultural demands of the 21st century are reshaping communication requirements. Students not only need to be able to communicate effectively in oral and written language, but they also need to communicate effectively in multimodal ways--they need to become skilled in multiliteracies. This article explains the two…

Suprasegmentals have been emphasized in ESL/EFL pedagogy since the advent of communicative language teaching. However, it is still unclear how individual suprasegmental features affect listeners' judgments of non-native speakers' accented speech. The current study began to specify relative weights of individual temporal and prosodic features for…

While strategy instruction research generally focuses on the effect of the teaching on learners' use of the strategies targeted for instruction, the present study examines the "wash over" effect on learners' use of pre-existing, non-target strategies. The study involved a treatment class and a comparison class in the ESL oral classroom…

Purpose: The contemporary practices of delivering speech, language, and hearing services in schools reflect palpable gains in professional sensitivity to linguistic and cultural diversity. Method: This article reviews the dominant research themes on the oral language of African American preschoolers who contribute to such diversity in the United…

In recent years, the emphasis in second language (L2) oral proficiency assessment has shifted from linguistic accuracy to discourse strategies such as the ability to initiate, respond, and negotiate meaning. This has resulted in a growing interest in the discourse analysis of students' performance in different oral proficiency assessment formats.…

The paper presents a critical evaluation of the Literature of the Troubles Project which was aimed at using literature in an educational context to help cement the process of peace and reconciliation between Northern Ireland's divided communities. The Project, funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, ran from September 2007 to August 2009. Its…

The aims of this research were to develop guidelines for designing interaction tasks for learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) and to investigate the attitudes of CFL learners toward a full CFL class in Second Life (SL). Three research questions were addressed in this research: (1) what are the attitudes of CFL learners toward the…

This study examines the effects of learning context and age on second language development by comparing the language gains, measured in terms of oral and written fluency, lexical and syntactic complexity, and accuracy, experienced by four groups of learners of English: children in a study abroad setting, children in their at-home school, adults in…

This study employed Bachman and Palmer's (2010) Assessment Use Argument framework to investigate to what extent the use of a second language oral test as an exit test in a Hong Kong university can be justified. It also aimed to help test developers of this oral test identify the most critical areas in the current test design that might need…

This study examined how the use of African American literature that depicts Black males influences the reading comprehension and the reading motivation of Black boys as demonstrated through oral, written, and creative expressions. Studies have been conducted using children's literature with Black boys to examine their social interaction with the…

Early Childhood Education (ECE) was globally and locally an innovation, particularly in third world. The objective of this study was to investigate an impact evaluation of ECE initiated recently in Pakistan. The data of impact evaluation were drawn from three ECE Centers of Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT), Pakistan. Total samples of 65…

This study examined the lived experience of students participating in foreign language houses to improve their skills in Russian, French, or Japanese. American students residing in apartments with other language learners and a native-speaking resident facilitator were required to speak with one another exclusively in the target language and…

This article provides a cultural-historical (CHAT) analysis of the practices used by an effective teacher of Latino/a children previously classified as "underachieving" and "beginning/novice" English Language Learners. Although the teacher would not describe her practices in strict CHAT, or sociocultural theory (SCT) terms, our analysis shows that…

This study examines the Spanish use of students and teachers at a US two-way immersion school. Students and teachers from Grades 1, 3, and 8 (5-6-year-olds, 7-8-years-olds, and 12-13-year-olds, respectively) were observed and interviewed, and students completed questionnaires to determine what factors influenced their language of choice and their…