Every day students are able to discuss complex ideas relatively easily in spontaneous conversation, yet when they attempt to express complex ideas in a written paper, students often experience great difficulty. The features of face-to-face conversation and of written communication differ in a number of respects. This study examines student's…

This study examined the development of spoken discourse among L2 learners of Japanese who received extensive practice on grammatical chunks. Participants in this study were 22 college students enrolled in an elementary Japanese course. They received instruction on a set of grammatical chunks in class through communicative drills and the…

This study is part of a broader project aimed at developing cognitive and neurocognitive profiles of adolescent and young adult readers whose educational and occupational prospects are constrained by their limited literacy skills. We explore the relationships among reading-related abilities in participants ages 16 to 24 years spanning a wide range…

The emergence of shared symbol systems is considered to be a pivotal moment in human evolution and human development. These changes are normally explained by reference to changes in people's internal cognitive processes. We present 2 experiments which provide evidence that changes in the external, collaborative processes that people use to…

Background: Research on the presentation of information in narrative versus expository text genres is inconclusive with respect to the question of which is more beneficial for student learning. Aims: We examine the effect of presenting factual content in either narrative or expository genres on student learning. We also consider relevant prior…

Purpose: L. E. Bernstein, M. E. Demorest, and P. E. Tucker (2000) demonstrated enhanced speechreading accuracy in participants with early-onset hearing loss compared with hearing participants. Here, the authors test the generalization of Bernstein et al.'s (2000) result by testing 2 new large samples of participants. The authors also investigated…

Everyday speech is littered with disfluency, often correlated with the production of less predictable words (e.g., Beattie & Butterworth [Beattie, G., & Butterworth, B. (1979). Contextual probability and word frequency as determinants of pauses in spontaneous speech. "Language and Speech, 22," 201-211.]). But what are the effects of disfluency on…

This article discusses the usefulness of anecdotes as a technique to stimulate learners' interest and thus create a meaningful learning context in the second language classroom. It describes the pattern of an anecdote and how it should be formed as well as the different types of anecdotes. The article offers tips to successfully implement this…

Purpose: The major purpose of this study was to provide information about expected spoken language skills of preschool-age children who are deaf and who use a cochlear implant. A goal was to provide "benchmarks" against which those skills could be compared, for a given age at implantation. We also examined whether parent-completed…

Using Conceptual Change Theory, this qualitative study of literacy teacher education investigated how eight beginning teachers developed knowledge about multicultural literacy pedagogy. Teachers' written and spoken language was analyzed from data sources collected during and outside of a preparation course, part of a nighttime alternative…

This research project examines students' reactions to in-class discussion as an instructional technique by investigating the effect of participation practices on communication-based skill development. The findings provide evidence that active preparation and participation in class discussion can be linked to students' reports of improved oral and…

Although the foreign-language profession routinely stresses the importance of technology for the curriculum, many teachers still harbor deep-seated doubts as to whether or not a hybrid course, much less a completely distance-learning class, could provide L2 learners with a way to reach linguistic proficiency, especially with respect to oral…

This paper reports on a study that investigated students' learning to self-assess oral performance in English by comparing student assessment with teacher assessment. Twenty-eight Chinese students at a university in southern Taiwan participated in the study. The assessment program involved training, observation, evaluation, discussion, feedback,…

Realistic spoken discourse, as it actually is used in real-life situations, would not be acceptable in the written medium: the established conventions of the written medium are not adequately equipped to convey the phonological subtleties and undertones of speech. Novelists use dialogue to imitate or mirror reality, but writing carries with it…

Communication scholars have dichotomized language into orality and literacy, with orality being the language of the "concrete" and literacy being the language of the "abstract." However, the human experience of language is not that simplistic. In daily linguistic patterns, written words and the "literal" are not…