This study investigates the oral language skills of 8-year-old children with impaired reading comprehension. Despite fluent and accurate reading and normal nonverbal ability, these children are poor at understanding what they have read. Tasks tapping 3 domains of oral language, namely phonology, semantics, and morphosyntax, were administered,…

A computer-aided Mandarin phonemes training (CAMPT) system was developed and evaluated for training hearing-impaired students in their pronunciation of Mandarin phonemes. Deaf or hearing-impaired people have difficulty hearing their own voice, hence most of them cannot learn how to speak. Phonemes are the basis for learning to read and speak in…

The relationships between phoneme categorisation, phonological processing, and reading performance were examined in Chinese-English speaking children in an English-speaking environment. Second language (L2, i.e., English) phonological processing but not phoneme categorisation was related to L2 reading. First language (L1) oral language skills were…

This study focuses on how valid information about learner perception of strategy use during communicative tasks can be gathered systematically from English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. First, the study attempted to develop a questionnaire for statistical analysis, named the Oral Communication Strategy Inventory (OCSI). The research…

This paper reports a study that followed the development of reading skills in 72 children from the age of 8.5 to 13 years. Each child was administered tests of reading, oral language, phonological skills and nonverbal ability at time 1 and their performance on tests of reading comprehension, word recognition, nonword decoding and exception word…

This article concerns the gap between government intention and classroom outcome. The author examines the treatment of spoken language in the Revised Irish Curriculum, which came into effect in 1999. He finds much to be commended in the recognition of its central role in learning. He then examines the implementation of this curriculum with…

Background: Claims that children with reading and oral language deficits have impaired perception of sequential sounds are usually based on psychophysical measures of auditory temporal processing (ATP) designed to characterise group performance. If we are to use these measures (e.g., the Tallal, 1980, Repetition Test) as the basis for intervention…

The ''ba, ba, ba'' sound universal to babies' babbling around 7 months captures scientific attention because it provides insights into the mechanisms underlying language acquisition and vestiges of its evolutionary origins. Yet the prevailing mystery is what is the biological basis of babbling, with one hypothesis being that it is a non-linguistic…

When creative uses of spoken language have been investigated, the main examples have been restricted to particular contexts such as narrative and related story-telling genres. This paper reports on an initial investigation using the 5 million word CANCODE corpus of everyday spoken English and discusses a range of social contexts in which creative…

There is broad agreement as to many of the segmental features of the Hong Kong accent of English: neutralisation of vowels which contrast in Standard Southern British English or General American, non-release of final stops, simplification of consonant clusters and devoicing of coda consonants. However, while it is apparent that there is no reason…

In this study the influence of prosodic foot structure on the processing of weak syllables in children with cochlear implants (CI) was investigated. A battery of tests investigating processing of weak syllables in single and multiword utterances was carried out on four groups of children: 15 children with CI developing spoken language as expected…

Studies using the English and Spanish MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories demonstrated that the grammatical abilities of 20--30-month-old bilingual children were related more strongly to same-language vocabulary development than to broader lexical-conceptual development or maturation. First, proportions of different word types in each…

This article explores conversations between preschool children and their teachers in the classroom environment. Teachers have an opportunity to engage students in cognitively challenging conversations at critical times during the day: book reading, playtime, and mealtimes. The article provides examples of the types of conversations preschool…

The purpose of this study was to determine how storytelling and story reading influence the language development and story comprehension of young children from 3 to 5 years of age. During the study, two groups of children heard the same 24 stories. Group A heard the stories told and Group B heard the stories read from a book. The language pre- and…

The development of oral language in classrooms has been an incidental occurrence historically. The amount of oral language that children have is an indicator of their success or struggle in school. To meet the needs of these children, teachers can make oral language development a primary focus for instruction. This article examines ways that…