Responding to concerns that play is at risk in the early years of education, this article investigates teachers' current use of play in language and literacy instruction in Grade 1 and 2 Alberta classrooms. It addresses what teachers say they need to make play part of school-based language and literacy education. Survey findings show a recognition…

Purpose: We sought to examine second grade teachers' word use throughout the school day to identify the amount and type of teacher vocabulary use across content areas as well as to examine relationships between this teacher talk and student language and literacy achievement. Method: Second grade teachers (n = 64) and a random sample of half of…

Purpose: We investigated four theoretically based latent variable models of word learning in young school-age children. Method: One hundred sixty-seven English-speaking second graders with typical development from three U.S. states participated. They completed five different tasks designed to assess children's creation, storage, retrieval, and…

Many words in English resemble one another in multiple ways. Words with similar spellings are referred to as "orthographic neighbors." The purpose of this within-subject experimental study was to examine the effect of orthographic neighbors on the spelling acquisition of second-grade students. In each of five sessions of a computer-based…

Music plays an important role in students' language development. Because the process of acquiring and developing language skills of the individual and learning to make music work have many similarities. In this quasi-experimental study, teaching the word in L1 with music with the normal intelligence and development level of 2nd-grade students on…

Existing studies have evidenced that mobile-assisted vocabulary learning, which allows students to create artefacts and engage in productive skills, can help them in vocabulary learning. However, there remains little research and validated approaches for designing seamless vocabulary learning experiences for young learners. In this paper, a…

The present study investigated the moderating role of orthographic consistency on the development of reading comprehension in four language groups (English, n = 179; Spanish, n = 188; Czech, n = 135; Slovak, n = 194) from kindergarten to Grade 2. In all languages, early variations in phoneme awareness/letter knowledge, rapid automatised naming,…

We explored whether knowledge building through read alouds of a conceptually coherent (CC) set of texts might support children's incidental acquisition of vocabulary in these texts and listening comprehension of related texts. Eleven classrooms of first (n = 83) and second grade students (n = 112) were randomly assigned to read alouds of either a…

Purpose: This study examines the development of narrative microstructure elements of productivity, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity in the oral story production of preschool- and school-age Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children. It also explores the effects of story task complexity on the target microstructural features. Method: This study…

How the construct of vocabulary is defined remains unclear although multiple theories have been put forth. In light of the lack of empirical work investigating the dimensionality of vocabulary knowledge in Chinese, the present study investigated the factor structure of Chinese print vocabulary in a sample of 111 Taiwanese children in Grades 1 and…

Socioeconomic disparities in early language are widespread and have long-lasting effects. The aim of this study is to investigate when social gaps in language problems arise and how they change across the first years of schooling. We address this question in two large longitudinal Norwegian datasets: the Behavior Outlook Norwegian Developmental…

Based on a theoretical model of instructional quality this study investigates the influence of different dimensions of instructional quality in the school entrance phase on students' language development taking into account child and family background factors as well as structural characteristics of the classroom and teacher's educational beliefs.…

There is strong evidence that movement and learning are deeply interlinked supporting effective cognitive functioning and thinking. The link between movement and learning constitutes a new pedagogical paradigm in the contemporary field of language learning and specifically in the area of Embodied Pedagogy and learning. Embodied theories argue that…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to gain more insight into the linguistic characterization of dyslexia by investigating vocabulary acquisition. In a previous study, vocabulary at 17 months of age appeared to be related to familial risk (FR) of dyslexia. The aim of this study was to investigate how the differences in lexical composition further…

We examined the language and reading progress of 336 young DHH children in kindergarten, first and second grades. Trained assessors tested children's language, reading, and spoken and fingerspelled phonological awareness in the fall and spring of the school year. Children were divided into groups based on their auditory access and classroom…