The author, having drawn examples from her doctoral study, describes how a thematic analysis approach was employed to interpret raw data in her doctoral study which explored the impacts of a high-stakes test on students and parents in Nepal. As the main purpose of this paper is to provide some guidelines for English language teaching (ELT)…

Comprehension is the ultimate aim of reading and listening. How do children develop the ability to comprehend written and spoken language, and what can be done to help those who are having difficulties? This book presents cutting-edge research on comprehension problems experienced by children without any formal diagnosis as well as those with…

Designed to assess a reader's comprehension of items differing in contrastive vocal stress, this test consists of 64 items divided evenly between eight sentence types: declarative active, declarative passive, interrogative, and imperative, with each in a positive and negative form. The element of contrastive stress is placed on nouns functioning…

The study investigated the alternate forms reliability of four type-token ratios (TTRs) of oral language samples obtained from 52 elementary school children. Findings indicated that TTRs were not comparable when calculated for different sample sizes and that they were not reliable measures of the language performance of this population. (Author/DB)

The three tests that make up this instrument are designed to assess the oral communication, grammatical fluency, and vocabulary development of students for whom English is a second language. The spoken English test comes in two versions: one with 90 items on a cassette tape, the other with 90 items to be read aloud by the examiner. Each version is…

The study investigated the effectiveness of a pragmatic language function protocol with a sample of 240 normal preschool children, aged 2-5, in a structured setting. The protocol was shown to be used reliably and was sensitive to differences in the mastery of language skills of normal children of different ages. (Author/JDD)

Describes kindergarten children's oral and written language behaviors while operating a computer. Stages of computer language play and children's experimentation with speech and writing specific to the computer also are discussed. (AS)

The Columbus, Ohio, Public Schools Level I Foreign Language Oral Assessment Project is reported. Using a small-group or team approach, the oral production of large numbers of students can be evaluated quickly and efficiently with brief, real-life examples from the body of tasks students have previously been assigned. (18 references) (Author/LB)

A college advanced speaking course designed with the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines is described. Students prepared and performed many communicative tasks, including narrating, describing, hypothesizing, supporting an opinion, debating, and interviewing for a job. Other components include pair and small-group work, audio and videotaping, and pre-…

Aimed at classroom teachers, researchers, staff developers, and policymakers, this bibliography of approximately 375 items is intended as a resource for the development of curricula that explicitly employ oral and written language to support learning across the curriculum. The journal articles, theses, and books in the annotated bibliography were…

This literature-based review examines the relationship between the acquisition of segmental awareness and the acquisition of alphabetic literacy. Cited studies show that the segmental analysis ability of most dyslexics is very poor and suggest one factor may be related to the conscious representation of speech on which the analytic capacity…

Thirty-six children, aged four-five, completed four vocabulary measures: Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised, Picture Vocabulary subtest of the Test of Oral Language Development, Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test, and Receptive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test. Only moderate correlations were found among these tests, implying that a…

Twenty-two junior-year college students were tested at a college language, speech and hearing clinic. A statistical analysis was performed on their scores on the Woodcock-Johnson Psychoeducational Battery and on oral and written language samples. Results were compared with those of a group of 25 normal college students in their junior year.…

Spanish-speaking children of Mexican descent living in California were tested on the acquisition of 18 Spanish consonants. The 120 subjects (aged 3 to 5:7 years) were equally divided into eight age groups, and the median ages (50%) and upper age limits (90%) of customary production of each consonant were determined. (Author/JDD)

This book is intended to serve as a reference for evaluators using the Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery--Revised (WJ-R) and to assist examiners in preparing psychoeducational reports for individuals of all ages. In the first section, a wide variety of educational recommendations is provided for the cognitive factors, oral language, and…