Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which phonological competition and semantic priming influence lexical access in school-aged children with cochlear implants (CIs) and children with normal acoustic hearing. Method: Participants included children who were 5-10 years of age with either normal hearing (n = 41) or…

Despite the continuous emphasis on emotion in multimedia learning, it was still unclear how pedagogical agent emotional cues might affect learning. In the present study, a between-subjects experiment was performed to examine the effects of a pedagogical agent with dual-channel emotional cues on learners' emotions, cognitive load, and knowledge…

Afghanistan has recently witnessed the redefinition of its educational policies, particularly those related to language teaching. However, little is known about Afghan second language (L2) teachers and the challenges they might face in their professional identity construction. This study investigated the challenges of professional identity…

Although the effective role of instruction in developing L2 learners' pragmatic competence has been acknowledged in the literature, very few studies have investigated the effect of a specific language teaching method on the development of pragmatic competence. Thus, to address the existing gap, this study was conducted (1) to investigate the…

According to research on new vocabulary development by text, frequent experiences with foreign words, as well as the context in which these words appear, facilitate word learning and retention. The aim of this analysis was to see how context levels, word occurrence rates, and the combination of these variables affected the understanding and…

Resources theory assumes that resource activation is context sensitive, and that an important dimension of context is the question students are answering. The context sensitivity of resource activation has been demonstrated empirically by case studies that show students using different resources to answer questions that are similar in focus. In…

Enhanced Conversational Recast (ECR) is an input-based grammatical intervention approach developed from research on statistical learning. Recent research reported evidence demonstrating the efficacy of ECR on the learning of grammatically obligatory morphemes in English-speaking preschool children with developmental language disorder (DLD). This…

This study investigates meaning-making processes in language and literacy assessments. Using a social semiotic perspective, it examines how adult second language learners with emerging literacy self-articulate their understanding of multimodal elements and components utilized in low-stakes assessments, and the strategies they use to make meaning…

Smartwatches may provide a natural, portable, and unobtrusive strategy by which to support directive-following for individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). A mentor can send visual supports (e.g., photographs, videos, text) "just-in-time" (JIT) to a learner's smartwatch. This may reduce the need for extraneous face-to-face…

How do you prepare your students for a future that you can't see? And how do you do it without exhausting yourself? Teachers need a framework that allows them to keep pace with our rapidly changing world without having to overhaul everything they do. "Learning That Transfers" empowers teachers and curriculum designers alike to harness…

The present dissertation investigated the impact of scales/scoring methods and prompt linguistic features on the measurement quality of L2 English elicited imitation (EI). Scales/scoring methods are an important feature for the validity and reliability of L2 EI test, but less is known (Yan et al., 2016). Prompt linguistic features are also known…

It is widely accepted that students' thinking drives teachers' teaching. There are many ways to probe students' thinking with speech or with gestures; however, the literature remains relatively distinct, not focused on both. Prior studies focus on probing students' thinking with speech (talk moves). Although Alibali and colleagues (e.g., Alibali…

The processing of structurally ambiguous sentences has proven resourceful in understanding the human parser. In particular, the resolution of globally and temporarily ambiguous relative clauses (RC) preceded by a complex noun phrase (NP) such as "Someone shot [the servant]NP1 of [the actress]NP2 [who was on the balcony]RC" has been found…

This paper adopts an ethnomethodological, conversation analytic approach to analyze the social organization of the instruction-giving sequences that were accomplished by a teacher of Italian as a foreign language during the last phase of a writing task conducted in pairs. Specifically, the paper explores the linguistic, prosodic and embodied…

When learning a language, typically-developing infants face the daunting task of learning both the sounds and the meanings of words. In this dissertation, we focus on a source of variability that complicates the one-to-one relationship between words and their meanings: wordform variability. In Chapter 1 we make a distinction between the micro…