This study explored whether presenting grammar instruction within the context of reading and writing would improve writing skills. The participating schools were using a traditional grammar instruction in which grammar lessons were predominately taught using worksheets and were presented separately from other reading and writing activities. This…

It has been suggested that difficulties with tense and agreement marking are a core feature of language impairment. Hence, studies are required that analyse the effectiveness of intervention in this area, including consideration of whether changes seen in therapy sessions generalize to spontaneous speech. This study assessed the effectiveness of…

This paper reports on an intervention study with young Polish beginners (mean age: 8 years, 3 months) learning English at school. It seeks to identify whether exposure to rhythmic input improves knowledge of word order and function words. The "prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis", relevant in developmental psycholinguistics, provided the…

Whether or not we are teachers, all of us must make sense of language. In doing so, we encounter representations of language, implicit or explicit descriptions which shift over time and are always tied to social and political interests. Teachers' work necessarily depends on these descriptions, which are deeply embedded within their…

This study investigated the feasibility of multicomponent linguistic awareness intervention on early literacy skills in at-risk kindergarteners. Seventeen students, including native Spanish-speaking English language learners (n = 10) and native English speakers (n = 7), participated in a 6-week small-group therapy program, for a total of 12…

This article focuses on qualitative self-report data from a mixed-methods study which investigated Grade 5 and 6 (n = 274), 11-12-year-old, Irish-medium (IM) immersion students' improvement in linguistic accuracy in response to an explicit-inductive approach to form-focused instruction (FFI). A series of typographically enhanced PowerPoint slides…

For children learning English as an additional language, dialogic teaching supports both learning content and learning language. Engaging language learners in dialogue offers special challenges, however. This article describes an instructional approach that focused on engendering purposeful and cumulative talk, supported by metalanguage from…

This study was designed to examine the effects of an intervention program aimed at improving reading, spelling, and vocabulary skills through linguistically explicit instruction in morphological awareness. Sixteen children, diagnosed with language impairment, participated in this study. Instruction for the experimental group focused on increasing…

The present study examined the use of narrative categories and mental state words in the fictional, personal, and hypothetical stories written by 150 children in the third, fourth, and fifth grades of primary school. There were three main results. First, children were better able to write fictional and hypothetical than personal stories, when…

We examined the relationship between morphological awareness and word reading skills in syllabic Hiragana and morphographic Kanji. Participants were 127 Grade 1 Japanese-speaking children who were followed until Grade 2. The results showed that Grade 1 morphological awareness was uniquely and comparably associated with word reading skills in both…

In the age of high stakes accountability, districts are being asked to provide and demonstrate academic achievement for all students including English Learners(ELs), who maybe also be identified as Emergent Bilinguals (EBs), or Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CLD). This becomes increasingly challenging especially for small rural districts…

Studies show that morphological and lexical awareness is a particularly important variable for reading comprehension after the primary school years. Research on L1 students' reading and writing competence has revealed correlations between reading and writing with regard to metalinguistic awareness, specifically also with regard to the subtypes:…

An in-depth exploration of the associations of two aspects of morphological awareness in Chinese--homophone awareness and lexical compounding awareness--to Chinese word reading and vocabulary knowledge was the primary focus of the present study. Among 154 9-year-old Hong Kong Chinese children, both lexical compounding and homophone awareness were…

Creative classroom constructions imbued with arts integration, a transmediational multimodal pedagogy, are examined in exploratory action research in three bilingual elementary classroom learning experiences. In each of the lessons, there was a whole-group introduction and small-group hands-on arts-based activities inclusive of peer dialoguing,…

Given that little research has been conducted to date in the classroom about the exploitation of aspects of "visual grammar" for the teaching of literacy, the purpose of this study is to provide research data to support the adoption of a common image/text relations metalanguage in educational practice as an effective tool for critically…