The overarching goal of this literature review is to improve the understanding of the importance of oral language to critical emergent literacy skills and explore available assessment measures for use within the classroom. An overview of the components of language (i.e., content, form, and use) is provided. Measures of oral language gleaned from a…

Developing oral presentation skills requires both practice and expert feedback. Several systems have been developed during the last 20 years to provide ample practice opportunities and automated feedback for novice presenters. However, a comprehensive literature review discovered that none of those systems have been adequately evaluated in real…

This study explored the influence of speech rate (normal vs. fast), sentence length (short vs. long), and second language (L2) oral proficiency on listening comprehension in L2 Spanish. Thirty-one native English-speaking learners enrolled in upper-level Spanish courses were aurally exposed to 8 sentences of each type of speed--length matrix, for a…

Purpose: Parental language input (PLI) has reliably been found to influence child language development for children at risk of language delay, but previous work has generally restricted observations to the preschool years. The current study examined whether PLI during the early years explains variability in the spoken language abilities of…

In the present study, we used latent variable structural equation modeling to investigate relations between oral language, decoding, and two components of executive function (cognitive flexibility and working memory) and reading comprehension in a sample of 271 native English-speaking 9.00- to 14.83-year-olds. Results of the mediation analyses…

Language sample analysis (LSA) has been called the "gold standard" for clinical language assessment with children learning more than one language. The research literature discussing this clinical tool with bilingual children has grown substantially in recent years. This article reviews and synthesizes the literature on LSA in order to…

Scientific understanding of the nature of intelligence has steadily evolved over the years; however, the past century has seen an explosion of research aimed at understanding the construction of intelligence, the relationships between neuroscience and cognitive skills, and the best ways to measure intellectual abilities. While there is no clear…

Conceptual models of early writing suggest multiple component skills support children's early writing development. Although research interest in early writing skills has grown in recent years, the majority of studies focus narrowly on procedural knowledge or transcription skills (i.e., handwriting and spelling) to the relative exclusion of how…

This study proposed an innovative automated approach to differentiation of the vocabulary proficiency of Chinese speakers. A robust K-means algorithm was designed to compare the oral proficiency between L1 and L2 Chinese speakers regarding lexical richness and how relatively effective the various lexical measures were in performing the…

We present lessons learned from an ongoing attempt to conceptualize, develop, and refine a way for teachers to gather formative assessment evidence about classroom argumentation as it happens. The system--named DiALoG (Diagnosing Argumentation Levels of Groups)--includes a digital scoring tool that allows teachers to assess oral classroom…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine whether oral bilingualism could be an advantage for children with hearing loss when learning new words. Method: Twenty monolingual and 13 bilingual children with hearing loss were compared with each other and with 20 monolingual and 20 bilingual children with normal hearing on receptive vocabulary…

In the context of early algebra research and as part of a classroom teaching experiment (CTE), we investigated fourth grade (9- to 10-year-old) students' justifications of how they performed tasks involving the functional relationship y = 2x. We related their written justifications (part of the task) to the task characteristics, which included…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to extract key learning from intervention studies in which qualitative aspects of dosage, "dose form," have been examined for children with developmental language disorder (DLD)--in vocabulary, morphosyntax, and phonology domains. This research paper emerged from a pair of systematic reviews, aiming to…

The accuracy of peer ratings on students' performance has attracted much attention from higher education researchers. In this study, we attempted to explore the accuracy of peer ratings on the quality of spoken-language interpreting in the context of tertiary-level interpreter training. We sought to understand how different types of peer raters…

'Sounds, Words, Aboriginal Language and Yarning' (SWAY) is a school-based oral language and early literacy programme based on Australian Aboriginal stories, knowledge and culture. It was developed by a multidisciplinary team in collaboration with Australian Aboriginal community members. SWAY aims to strengthen and support the communication skills…