A high percentage of school-age students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have reading comprehension difficulties leading to academic disadvantage. These difficulties may be related to differences in children's emergent literacy development in the preschool years. In this study, we examined the relationship between emergent literacy skills,…

Background: The English language school-based assessment (SBA) component of the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE) Examination is innovative in that the assessment tasks involve assessing English oral language skills in a high-stakes context but they are designed and implemented in the ESL classroom by school teachers in light of a…

Peer assessment (PA) has transformed traditional teacher-only assessment into the student-centred assessment. While this pedagogical approach has been adopted online in recent years, incorporating PA into classrooms has proven to be challenging. In this study, mobile-supported PA (M-PA) activities using Instant Response System (IRS) mechanisms to…

Following the call in Sandlund, Sundqvist, and Nyroos (2016) for incorporating discursive approaches into the field of oral second language (L2) testing, this paper proposes an interactional usage-based approach to the analysis of oral L2 performance. Based on Eskildsen (2018a), we combine analytic tools from usage-based linguistics and…

One of the tasks for language teachers is to create an interactive environment to help learners communicate globally in the 21st century. Employing a case-study design, this research is aimed to explore how far using the target language (L2), as the main language of classroom interaction, can affect students' oral fluency through the technique of…

The differences and similarities in the word recognition and reading comprehension skills of monoliterate Albanian-Greek (ML2), biliterate Albanian-Greek (BL2) and monolingual (L1) children in grades 3-6 were examined in two cross-sectional studies. Participants completed standardized and experimental tasks measuring cognitive, oral language and…

Orthographic processing -- the ability to perceive, access, differentiate, and manipulate orthographic knowledge -- is essential when learning to recognize words. Despite its critical importance in literacy acquisition, the field lacks a tool to assess this essential cognitive ability. The goal of this study was to design a computer-based…

The home-learning environment (HLE) is critical for young children's early learning skills, yet little research has focused on HLEs in indigenous communities. This study examined the role of the HLE of 41 whanau (New Zealand Maori families and community) in relation to their young children's (M = 4 years, 4 months) early learning skills. Parents…

This article synthesizes multiple studies that we have conducted on language and literacy practices among Latinx siblings at home, and identifies implications for teaching. Examples from micro-ethnographic discourse analyses provide rich vignettes of sibling interactions within Mexican and Central American immigrant households to illustrate how…

The authors developed a digital spelling game to promote children's early literacy skills. Based on the dual-coding theory, the authors studied the benefits of auditory support alone versus auditory+visual support. Children played the game in three conditions: no support, hearing the whole word; auditory-only support, hearing a word segmented; and…

This research was aimed at investigating the pedagogical roles of computer games (Hao et al, 2019, Chen & Hsu, 2019). It explored the impact of computer "mixed with language" (White et al, 2019) training, using simulation games, upon language acquisition and diverse daily-life knowledge. In a teacher preparation university of western…

This study aimed at investigating whether using some instructional scaffolding strategies would be effective in developing oral productive skills among female English majors in the college of education in Azulfi, Majmaah University. It also aimed to know the size of that effectiveness. The participants of the study were 62 and they were divided…

Language tests are useful for many purposes, including monitoring language learning progress and evaluating language programs. This study investigated the interpretations and usefulness of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Oral Proficiency Interview -- Computer (OPIc) scores across four languages at a large US…

For the present review, we analyzed 28 studies researching the effects of interventions for parents with less education on the oral language development of their young children (ages 3-8). Two groups of interventions were distinguished: shared reading and other home activities. Within each group, we distinguished three categories of strategies:…

Julian of Norwich (1342-1416), was a Christian mystic whose writings, "Revelation of Love" and "A Book of Showings," are the earliest surviving texts in the English language written by a woman. The question that has puzzled scholars for centuries follows: How could a woman of her time express her vision in such innovative and…