This paper describes teachers' practices and their perceptions regarding the teaching and learning of oral language in Catalan schools. We used the Assessment Scale for Oral Language Teaching in School Settings (EVALOE) instrument, created and validated with the aim of assessing teachers' practices for promoting the development of language skills…

Children's oral language proficiency (OLP) is integral for developing literacy skills. Storytelling or retelling is often used by parents and educators to elicit children's OLP, yet it is less commonly used for assessment purposes. Leveraged by natural language processing and machine learning, this study examined the extent to which computational…

This dissertation examines heritage language learners of Spanish enrolled in university Spanish courses, focusing on their strategic use of suprasegmental speech features in two speaking tasks. The research investigates attitudes' influence on heritage language learners' speech production in different task types. Participants engaged in two…

Many bilingual preservice teachers in Texas are not able to get certified because of language limitations. Although they have grown up listening and speaking their native language at home, with family and friends, many face challenges when using academic language in a formal setting. There is a mismatch between their language level and their…

Numerous studies have investigated the effects of prewriting tasks on writing quality and language (e.g., individual vs. collaborative planning, text-chat vs. face-to-face [FTF] discussion, etc.). Recent meta-analyses have found a small advantage for text chat on writing, but no studies involved logographic languages, for which character learning…

In its descriptors for oral fluency the Common European Framework of Reference includes frequent references to the tempo of speech and the use of pausing. The present study aims to provide empirical evidence that these fluency phenomena exist; it also seeks to establish how they distinguish two different levels of proficiency (B2 and C1) among L2…

Courses: Introduction to Rhetoric and Communication, Basic Course, Public Speaking, Classical Rhetoric. Objectives: To re-establish disciplinary commitment to civic education in perilous democratic times through "imitatio."

International assessments show that 20% of adolescents cannot read simple texts with understanding. Despite this, research has focused on early reading in childhood and skilled reading in adulthood, neglecting reading development during adolescence. We report a longitudinal study assessing reading and vocabulary development at 12, 13 and 14 years…

While we know that interventions targeting oral language can be effective, little is known about what drives these effects. In this study, we examine whether gains in transfer measures are mediated through the specific words that are trained in a language intervention. Based on a large-scale randomized controlled trial of language intervention in…

This article reports on part of an ethnographic research project undertaken over a period of 20 months in Leeds, UK, with a youth spoken word (YSW) poetry organisation. The research focused on the fluid practices in which the youth engage that span spoken, written, visual, gestural, digital, musical and spatial modes, and across times and places.…

Forty deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children aged between seven and 13 were tested using two reading assessments selected to separately measure the skills of phonological decoding and reading comprehension. The Nonword Reading Test and the Edinburgh Reading Test, respectively, were used. All of the children were enrolled in full mainstream…

This classroom-based study investigated the antecedents of epistemic curiosity among 25 Thai university students in an English oral communication course. Using a whole-class survey and focus group interview, we recursively asked the students to describe a time in class when they experienced epistemic curiosity and the reasons behind it. A modified…

This longitudinal study explores the effects of time and proficiency pairing on the amount and purpose of L1 use in task-based peer interaction by EFL primary school learners. Most of the studies available to date on L1 use in peer interaction involve adult learners, and we have little empirical evidence on the role played by the L1 in child peer…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to use an established model of working memory in children to predict an established model of word learning to determine whether working memory explained word learning variance over and above the contributions of expressive vocabulary and nonverbal IQ. Method: One hundred sixty-seven English-speaking second…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and hyperlexia (HPL) have both advanced word reading skills and a reading comprehension disorder, alongside impaired oral language. We developed a unique, parent-supported, tablet-based intervention aiming to improve oral and reading comprehension at the word-, phrase- and sentence-level, for…