This highly practical guide is grounded in the authors' experience setting up and running a successful professional development program to improve K-3 reading instruction. The book systematically describes how professional development works: how sessions are organized, what they contain, routines and procedures, and the roles of each participant.…

Vocabulary knowledge contributes to comprehension, fluency, and student achievement. The goal of vocabulary instruction should be to build students' independent word-learning strategies. This article provides research and theory in support of nine key ideas about words and vocabulary instruction. These ideas are important for middle and secondary…

This study compared the performance of students with and without learning disabilities (LD) on a mathematics test using a standard administration procedure and a read-aloud accommodation. Analyses were conducted on the test scores of 625 middle and high school students (n = 388 with LD) on two equivalent 30-item multiple-choice tests. Whereas mean…

This paper presents the results of a study developed in the context of indigenous teachers education from Xingu Indian Park, Brazil. The indigenous bilingual (or multilingual in some cases) teachers that participated in this education program were from 14 ethnic groups. The research focused on a mathematics textbook production, written in…

Anna is a 13-year-old student who has a learning disability and is eligible for special education and related services. Anna's parents enrolled her in the Private Academy for fifth grade; her frustration, inappropriate behaviors, and inattention had increased during fourth grade. In its year-end report, the Private Academy described Anna's…

In light of a major study on educational outcomes, this paper explores how Aboriginal language dominance and virtually exclusive use of oral communications in one Aboriginal group has been affected by its interaction with Western institutions. For several years negotiations have been undertaken among the Innu Nation of Labrador, the province of…

In the Singlish-"Good" English debate, the use of Singlish (SCE) is viewed as an obstacle to the development of students' literacy skills in standard English (SSE) and so the practice of classroom codeswitching between the two varieties is strongly discouraged. Yet the presence of the vernacular in the classroom continues to be robust.…

Although Keenan and Comrie's (1977) noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH) has been shown to predict the difficulty order of relative clauses (RCs) in SLA, most studies of the NPAH have been on European languages. This paper tests the prediction for Japanese. Study 1 analyzes RCs in an oral interview corpus from 90 learners of Japanese at four…

This study examines and compares the production of discourse markers by native speakers and learners of English based on a pedagogic sub-corpus from CANCODE, a corpus of spoken British English, and a corpus of interactive classroom discourse of secondary pupils in Hong Kong. The results indicate that in both groups discourse markers serve as…

Background/Context: The theoretical framework of the paper comes from research on problem solving, considered by many to be the essence of mathematics; research on the importance of oral language in learning mathematics; and on the importance of the teacher as the primary instrument of learning mathematics for most students. As a nation, we are…

A three-tiered statistical model for predicting the temporal structure of French, as produced by a single, highly fluent subject at a fast speech rate, is outlined. The first tier models segmental influences due to phoneme type and contextual interactions between phoneme types. The second tier models syllable-level influences of lexical versus…

Three issues of this newsletter (Spring, Summer, and Fall/Winter), produced by the Project in Adult Immigrant Education at the Center for Applied Linguistics, provide information from the field of adult immigrant education, highlights of programs in a particular industry, "promising practices" in training and development, new resources, and…

This study of the narratives of 48 black, low-income, urban kindergartners examined the frequency of topic-centered style (a discourse centering on a single topic) and topic-associating style (a discourse of personal anecdotes or episodes whose connections are never overtly stated). The children were from four classrooms in two schools in Pontiac,…

Telling and listening to stories is an ancient tradition that can benefit foreign language learners of all ages, languages, and levels of proficiency. Stories contain linguistic, paralinguistic, discourse, and cultural features that provide the comprehensible input and output that students need to develop their conversational skills. Instructors…

A study of syntactic variation in Spanish spoken by native speakers in the United States examined patterns of variation in different areas of the country. High school students in larger Hispanic communities throughout the country were surveyed concerning their own and their parents' demographic characteristics and their Spanish speaking,…