While it is widely accepted that language teachers require knowledge of second language acquisition (SLA) (Richards, 2010), what about content teachers, who are increasingly required to help develop their learners' academic language proficiency? How much do they need to know about SLA theories and how can they acquire such knowledge and expertise?…

This paper reports on the process of developing an original framework for conceptualising and measuring language learner well-being within the context of heritage language (HL) learning. Drawing on a quantitative validation study with 545 young Chinese heritage language (CHL) learners, aged 7-18, in the UK, this paper presents an empirically…

Verbal interactions between children and educators can support the language development of preschoolers when conversations are of high quality. Educators' conversations with preschoolers are known to be responsive, but they are not always sufficiently complex. Educators' talk and topics may be too simple to propel preschoolers' oral language…

Purpose: A rich body of evidence has illuminated the importance of caregivers' use of prosody in facilitating young children's language development. Although caregiver-child shared reading has been repeatedly linked to children's language skills, caregiver prosody during shared reading interactions (i.e., oral reading expressiveness) has been…

A strong predictor of children's language is performance on non-word repetition (NWR) tasks. However, the basis of this relationship remains unknown. Some suggest that NWR tasks measure phonological working memory, which then affects language growth. Others argue that children's knowledge of language/language experience affects NWR performance. A…

Second language (L2) grammar learning is difficult. Two frameworks--the psycholinguistic lexical bottleneck hypothesis and the neurocognitive declarative/procedural model--predict that faster L2 lexical processing should facilitate L2 incidental grammar learning. We tested these predictions in a pretest-posttest syntactic adaptation study of…

Dual language learners are often underidentified for having language delays and may not receive services in their caregiver's primary language. This study explored how the language used during evaluations influenced the effectiveness of a brief intervention for children with mild language delays. By examining whether evaluation language impacts…

The positive turn in SLA (MacIntyre at al., 2016) has sparked growing interest in the relationship between positive affective variables and language learning outcomes. Foreign language enjoyment has garnered particular attention as a positive emotion supporting language learning behaviors and achievement. However, within psychology and cognition,…

In today's globalised and networked life ecologies, the language socialisation and literacy experiences of children around the globe are increasingly multilingual. Children encounter new languages early on in kindergarten and school and many children speak home languages other than the community language. Science and education have a joint…

This narrative literature review explores language as a precursor for developing children's psychosocial skills in war-torn areas. By utilising Bronfenbrenner's ecological theory, this study aimed to understand the lifelong consequences of early childhood language deprivation in war-stricken zones, thus suggesting intervention strategies to…

Background: Infants born preterm are at high risk of facing difficulties with acquiring speech, language and communication skills. Research on the direct benefits of parent--infant communication in neonatal units is limited. This study recognises that although neonatal nurses regard early communication as important, there is scope to develop a…

Story-time serves as an interactive linguistic tool through which parents encourage their children to share narratives. Grounded in sociocultural and narrative theories, this study employed a visual ethnographic approach to explore how parents perceive and engage in story-time interactions within 33 Chinese families. Data were collected through…

This meta-analysis included 27 empirical studies to explore the effectiveness of robot-assisted language learning (RALL) as well as the moderating effects of a number of variables. The comparison of 64 effect sizes from 2,637 participants indicated significant variability between the independent samples. The overall results showed that the…

Computational thinking (CT) has emerged as a foundational skill for young learners, preparing them to navigate and contribute to an increasingly digital world. This bibliometric analysis utilizes 374 articles from the Web of Science database to explore the research landscape surrounding CT in children's learning, focusing on its applications in…

This study investigated developmental pathways between early language and later social skills in a large, prospective cohort consisting of 3387 mother-child dyads. Mediational pathways were examined between parent-reported expressive language (at 2 years of age) and social skills (at 8 years of age), via core language and pragmatic language (at 5…