Purpose: The authors set out to determine (a) whether African American children's spontaneous spoken language met use criteria for a revised minimal competence core with original and added morphosyntactic patterns at different geographical locations, and (b) whether pass/fail status on this core was differentiated on other criterion measures of…

As the Common Core State Standards Initiative moved from the development and adoption of the standards to their implementation, ASCD embarked on a multifaceted program to help educators understand and implement the new standards. With support from a $3 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, ASCD has enacted a three-pronged…

This study presents the results of four experiments in the framework of processing instruction conducted with four language learner groups (Spanish, "n"?=?43; German, "n"?=?46; Russian, "n"?=?44; and French, "n"?=?48; discussed in that order). In each experiment, the processing problem was held constant (the…

The widening participation agenda has important implications for those in English-medium higher education institutions responsible for the provision of English language support. Importantly, given the diverse nature of the "non-traditional" student cohort that is the focus of this agenda, that section of the student population…

The number of English Language Learners (ELLs) is rapidly growing. Teachers continue facing challenges in providing effective content instruction to ELLs while helping them learn English. New and improved approaches are necessary to meet the individual learning needs of this diverse group of students and help them progress academically while…

This paper presents findings from a quantitative, correlational study that examined selected school nursing services, student academic outcomes, and school demographics. Ex post facto data from the 2011-2012 school year of Delaware public schools were used in the research. The selected variables were school nurse interventions provided to students…

The large-scale expansion of primary schooling in developing countries has led to the increasing use of non-civil-service contract teachers who are hired locally by the school, are not professionally trained, have fixed-term renewable contracts, and are paid much lower salaries than regular civil-service teachers. This has been a controversial…

The report examines 2012-2013 Austin Independent School District (AISD) student academic performance results on the state academic test (STAAR), on an early reading test (Tejas Lee), on the Language Assessment Scales (LAS) Links, and on the state's English language proficiency test (TELPAS) for English language learners in the AISD dual language…

This study examined the influence of prompt characteristics on the averages of all scores given to test taker responses on the TOEFL iBT[TM] integrated Read-Listen-Write (RLW) writing tasks for multiple administrations from 2005 to 2009. In the context of TOEFL iBT RLW tasks, the prompt consists of a reading passage and a lecture. To understand…

This article examines certain aspects of the debate surrounding English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). It argues that in some ways, neither ELF nor its opponents have come to terms with the complexities of English in a globalized world. By defining ELF according to how it differs from native-speaker language use, ELF researchers have tended to…

This article presents considerations for using automated scoring systems to evaluate second language writing. A distinction is made between English language learners in English-medium educational systems and those studying English in their own countries for a variety of purposes, and between learning-to-write and writing-to-learn in a second…

This paper discusses how a group of students from Chulalongkorn University prepared for the CU-Tep examination. In order to gather the information, a questionnaire was given to 16 students from the Education Department of Chulalongkorn University. The findings indicated three things. First, was the general lack of preparation by approximately half…

This article summarizes the individual contributions to this special issue and discusses the advantages and implications of adopting a multilingual approach. The advantages include the possibility of examining language practices in context and providing insights about the way languages are acquired and used. This multilingual approach also opens…

The purpose of this study is to examine whether learning a known-and-unknown word combination is superior in terms of retention and retrieval of meaning to learning a single unknown word. The term "combination" in this study means a two-word collocation of a familiar word and a word that is new to the participants. Following the results of…

Purpose: Research on the diagnostic accuracy of different language measures has focused primarily on English. This study examined the sensitivity and specificity of a range of measures of language knowledge and language processing for the identification of primary language impairment (PLI) in French-speaking children. Because of the lack of…