Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine sentence-recognition performance for a large, diverse group of nonnative speakers of English on the recently developed Basic English Lexicon (BEL) sentence materials and to determine whether BEL sentence lists are equated in difficulty for this population. Method: The BEL sentences were presented…

Background: The dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4) has been linked to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and reading disorders. In this study, we examined whether diminished anticipatory dopamine cell firing--typical of the long variant of the DRD4 allele--is related to emergent and advanced alphabetic skills, and whether executive…

This study investigated the effects of shared reading on oral vocabulary development with 42 second language (L2) learners in Dakar, Senegal. Participants, ranging from four to six years old, were taught French target words using predictable books, non-predicable books, and control activities of the typical local instructional practice of using…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether results on the English Early Assessment Program (EAP) examination predict college-level English success. Previous research indicates a relationship between EAP college-prepared status and academic achievement. The present study is unique, in that student-level community college English grades were…

The purpose of this descriptive study was to describe Missouri middle-level school principals' perceptions of their instructional leadership practices. The Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale (PIMRS) by Philip Hallinger was used to define the measured leadership tasks (www.philiphallinger.com). There were a total of 77 middle-level…

This study compares Spanish morphosyntax error types and magnitude in monolingual Spanish and Spanish-English bilingual children with typical language development (TD) and language impairment (LI). Performance across groups was compared using cloze tasks that targeted articles, clitics, subjunctives, and derivational morphemes in 57 children.…

The focus of this paper is application of the concept of "sonority" to the study of aphasic speech. An assessment tool that is capable of examining sonority effects was developed and administered to a patient diagnosed to have progressive non-fluent aphasia. This tool successfully distinguished the performance of the patient from that of two…

Video technology is commonly used in L2 classrooms, but it is rarely used in assessing L2 listening, and there is little research investigating how L2 listeners process video texts (spoken texts that include the visual channel). The purpose of this study is to examine how L2 test-takers interact with a video listening test: the rate L2 listening…

Previous language learning research reveals that the statistical properties of the input offer sufficient information to allow listeners to segment words from fluent speech in an artificial language. The current pair of studies uses a natural language to test the ecological validity of these findings and to determine whether a listener's language…

In educational systems, concern has been expressed about the accuracy of classification when marks are aligned to grades or levels. In particular, it has been claimed that a school assessment-based grading would have much greater levels of accuracy than one based on examination scores. This paper investigates classification consistency by…

"I was grabbed early [by vocabulary] and never let go. That's why it's difficult to explain why I enjoy working in this area. I just love doing it," said Paul Nation (in Coxhead, 2005, p. 46). How many people get grabbed by an area of research, teaching, and learning that continues to engage interest and cause excitement after 30 years? In this…

Making Nation's text analysis software accessible via the World Wide Web has opened up an exploration of how his learning principles can best be realized in practice. This paper discusses 3 representative episodes in the ongoing exploration. The first concerns an examination of the assumptions behind modeling what texts look like to learners with…

Tasks with a complex, dynamic visual component require not only the acquisition of conceptual/procedural but also of perceptual/attentional skills. This study examined expertise differences in perceiving and interpreting complex, dynamic visual stimuli on a performance and on a process level, including perceptual and conceptual strategies.…

The study described in this article investigated the relationship between three variables in the IELTS oral module--planning, proficiency, and task--and was designed to enhance our understanding of how or whether these variables interact. The study aimed to determine whether differences in performance resulted from 1 or 2 min of planning time. It…

This article investigates how measurement models and statistical procedures can be applied to estimate the accuracy of proficiency classification in language testing. The paper starts with a concise introduction of four measurement models: the classical test theory (CTT) model, the dichotomous item response theory (IRT) model, the testlet response…