For all students, a high-quality early education is critical to ensuring their long-term academic success. Early learners need to understand why people read and write in order to be motivated to excel in their own literacy development. Through active engagement in the reading process, children learn ways to use their growing knowledge and skills…

Phonological awareness has been repeatedly reported as important for learning to read in different orthographies. It is important to understand what specific levels of phonological awareness are involved in Chinese and English for Chinese children who learn English-as-a-second-language (ESL). Measures of phonological awareness, word reading,…

As English learners face the double demands of building knowledge of a second language while learning complex grade-level content, teachers must find effective ways to make challenging content comprehensible for students. This updated English learner practice guide, "Teaching Academic Content and Literacy to English Learners in Elementary and…

Apraxic agraphia is a writing disorder due to a loss or lack of access to motor engrams that program the movements necessary to produce letters. Clinical and functional neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that the neural network responsible for writing includes the superior parietal region and the dorsolateral and medial premotor cortex. Recent…

The present study examines the effect of activating the connection between meaning and phonology in spelling exercises in second-grade spellers (n=41; 8 years and 3 months). In computer-based exercises in a within-subject design, semantic and neutral descriptions were contrasted and provided either before the process of spelling or in feedback.…

Using rhetorical genre theory and research on reported speech, this study investigates the citation practices in 81 forensic letters written by paediatricians and nurse practitioners that provide their opinion for the courts as to whether a child has experienced maltreatment. These letters exist in a complex social situation where a lack of…

This discourse analysis study examines the use of online texts in the live conversations of adolescents at and around computers in the Young Adult section of a Midwestern public library serving a diverse SES population. On the cusp of cyberspace, where online texts influence conversation and the conversation influences the creation of online…

In recent years, genre studies have attracted the attention of many researchers. The aim of the present study was to observe the differences in generic structure of doctoral dissertation acknowledgements texts written by English native and non-native (Chinese) PhD students. To this end, thirty native English students' acknowledgement texts and the…

It's been well documented in a number of articles regarding the contemporary library patron that with the rise in mobile computing and smart phone technology, patrons are looking for fast and easy service from whichever technological avenue they are using to access library services. Libraries are responding with increasing numbers of online…

The present study examined the influence of Singapore Colloquial English (SCE) on Standard English word spelling through a plural formation task of four words ("man", "tooth", "dress" and "child") among 168 Singaporean bilingual children with Chinese background. It was found that "dropping the…

Purpose: Adults with language-based disabilities are known to have deficits in oral language; however, less is known about their written language skills. Two studies were designed to characterize the writing of adults with language-based disabilities. Method: In Study 1, 60 adults, 30 with language impairment and 30 with typical language,…

This study investigated the stability of propositional density (PD) in written texts, as this aspect of language shows promise as an indicator and as a predictor of language decline with ageing. This descriptive longitudinal study analysed written texts obtained from the Australian Longitudinal Study of Women's Health in which participants were…

The tweens are a transitional age group undergoing deep physical and psychological transformations. Based on a thirteen-focus group research design involving 103 students, and applying a tweens-centered approach, the characteristics of SMS, IM, Internet, digital photos, electronic games, and email were analyzed. Categories such as moral issues,…

This document presents the proceedings of the 21st Annual Research Forum held June 30, 2016, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Included are the following 11 action research papers: The Use of Mexican Folk Art to Develop Oral and Written Language Ability and Cultural Awareness in the Secondary Spanish Classroom (Antonio…

L1 habits often tend to interfere with the process of learning a second language. The vowel habits of Arab learners of English are one such interference. Arabic orthography is such that certain vowels indicated by diacritics are often omitted, since an experienced reader of Arabic knows, by habit, the exact vowel sound in each phonetic…