Research has confirmed that many students in the middle grades and high schools experience serious challenges with respect to content area tasks that involve literacy. Over time, educators have become more knowledgeable and informed about content literacy instructional practices for developing vocabulary, comprehension, study strategies, and…

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…

Do older English as a second language (ESL) children have the same knowledge of word meanings as English as a first language (EL1) children? How important is vocabulary's role in predicting word recognition in these groups? This study sought to answer these questions by examining the profiles of ESL and EL1 upper elementary aged children, for a…

The purpose of present paper was twofold. Firstly, it aimed at outlining the rationale for and the process of introducing an English language learning intervention to kindergarten children in a playful and supportive environment. It focused on developing children's oral skills through participating in creative child-appropriate activities and…

The gestures children produce predict the early stages of spoken language development. Here we ask whether gesture is a global predictor of language learning, or whether particular gestures predict particular language outcomes. We observed 52 children interacting with their caregivers at home, and found that gesture use at 18 months selectively…

The aims of the present study are to examine whether preschool children's scores on a standardized test of vocabulary mediate or moderate the relation between shyness and reticence and to test whether any influence of vocabulary would be found for both teacher and parent assessments of shyness. Participants were 108 children (50 males), mean age,…

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…

Purpose: This exploratory study examined predictive relationships between 5 types of behaviors and the trajectories of vocabulary and language development in young children with autism over 2 years. Method: Participants were 69 children with autism assessed using standardized measures prior to the initiation of early intervention (T1) and 6 months…

By school age, some bilingual children can score equivalently to monolinguals in receptive vocabulary but still lag in expressive vocabulary. In this study, we test whether bilingual children have greater difficulty with lexical access, as has been reported for adult bilinguals. School-aged French-English bilingual children were given tests of…

Recognizing the importance of starting early, the purpose of our article is to examine if and how vocabulary is taught in commercially prepared early literacy curriculum for pre-K. Ten curriculum programs are reviewed to determine the prevalence of vocabulary instruction and the pedagogical practices used to support the learning of words and their…

Legislation mandates that all children, including children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), be taught to read in ways that are consistent with reading research and target the five components of evidence-based reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension strategies. This review synthesized…

There has been a resurgence of deficit discourses that implicate deficiencies in the language and culture of poor students as the cause of their academic failures. An influential study by Betty Hart and Todd Risley concludes that high levels of academic failure among poor children can be linked to the quantity and quality of language interactions…

The goal of the present work was to examine the effects of bilingualism on adults' ability to resolve cross-linguistic inconsistencies in orthography-to-phonology mappings during novel-word learning. English monolinguals and English-Spanish bilinguals learned artificially constructed novel words that overlapped with English orthographically but…

This paper is based on a study on speaking fluency performed by six low level students using retelling technique. The aim of the study is to find out the effect of retelling on the students' speaking fluency and to know the strategies used by those students while retelling a story. The data were the speaking transcripts which were analyzed to see…

Merging the literatures of how to enhance young children's vocabulary development and how to improve learning through play, this study tested two vocabulary teaching protocols on at-risk preschool children: Explicit Instructional Vocabulary Protocol (EIVP) and shortened EIVP and a play session (EIVP + Play). From a group of 118 lowest-performing…