This article discusses the importance of children's participation in conversations and dialogue and the relationship to oral language development. Highlighting the importance of the early years, a brief review of the development of oral language and vocabulary is included. Information on asking good questions and teaching children to listen is…

This article presents the methodology adopted for transcribing and quantifying temporal fluency phenomena in a spoken L2 corpus (L2 English, French, and Italian by learners of different proficiency levels). The CHILDES suite is being used for transcription and analysis, and we have adapted the CHAT format in order to code disfluencies as precisely…

The present study assessed 89 children in a short-term longitudinal study from Junior Kindergarten (age 4-5 years) through Grade 1 (age 6-7 years) using a variety of tests of emergent literacy. Children were assessed for reading skill (a composite of word recognition, decoding, and letter-sound knowledge), phonological awareness, and oral language…

This descriptive study reports findings on the relationship between focus on form, learner uptake and subsequent lexical gains in learners' oral production. The data for the study consisted in 17 45-minute audio-recorded teacher-led conversations, 204 learners' diaries (17 sessions x 12 learners) reporting what they had learned after each…

This single-subject study assessed the effects of in-classroom coaching on early childhood teachers' use of emergent literacy teaching strategies. Teaching strategies were grouped into clusters related to oral language and comprehension of text, phonological awareness and alphabetic principle, and print concepts and written language, with coaching…

This article presents a selective overview of studies that have investigated auditory language processing in children and late second-language (L2) learners using online methods such as event-related potentials (ERPs), eye-movement monitoring, or the cross-modal priming paradigm. Two grammatical phenomena are examined in detail, children's and…

Students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) frequently demonstrate language delays (American Psychiatric Association "2000"). This study investigated the effects of a Direct Instruction (DI) language program implemented with elementary students with ASD. There is little research in the area of DI as a language intervention for students with ASD.…

This paper assesses the expressive spoken grammar skills of young deaf children using cochlear implants who are beginning formal education, compares it with that achieved by normally hearing children and considers possible implications for educational management. Spoken language grammar was assessed, three years after implantation, in 45 children…

The second language group oral is a test of second language speaking proficiency, in which a group of three or more English language learners discuss an assigned topic without interaction with interlocutors. Concerns expressed about the extent to which test takers' personal characteristics affect the scores of others in the group have limited its…

This article documented spoken language outcomes for preschool children with hearing loss and examined the relationships between language abilities and characteristics of children such as degree of hearing loss, cognitive abilities, age at entry to early intervention, and parent involvement in children's intervention programs. Participants were…

Thai has its own distinctive alphabetic script with syllabic characteristics as it has implicit vowels for some consonants. Consonants are written in a linear order, but vowels can be written non-linearly above, below or to either side of the consonant. Of particular interest to the current study are that vowels can precede the consonant in…

The following article is based on the analysis of the compensation strategies used by two groups of intermediate students of English language at the Official School of Languages of Moratalaz (Madrid) in the academic year 2009/2010. Our analysis tries to describe to what extent adult learners make use of suitable learning strategies in the four…

Recent developments in deaf education are influencing teacher preparation programs, which are facing challenges in meeting the critical need for highly qualified teachers. Of approximately 65 teacher preparation programs in the United States, 11 programs focus primarily on preparing teachers to work with children who are deaf or hard of hearing…

This article describes the use of African American English (AAE) in the written and oral language of African American adolescents who struggle with writing. Written and oral language samples of 22 African American 10th-grade students were transcribed, analyzed, and coded for AAE, grammatical errors, spelling errors, and punctuation errors. Four…

This study compares characteristics of fluency in student audio journals recorded in a laboratory setting with those recorded using mobile audio devices. Forty graduate students enrolled in four oral communication courses at an American university recorded weekly audio journals for a 10-week term. Students chose the environment in which they…