Research Findings: The present study investigates both the proximal processes and contextual influences on children's oral language development in preschool. We examine whether teacher language practices vary across activity settings and program type, which teacher language practices predict children's oral language skills, and potential…

Purpose: The primary aims of this study were to: (1) to describe average change in the writing quality of fifth grade students from the fall and spring of the school year; (2) examine relations between linguistic features and writing quality rating; and (3) test for differential growth between groups of students who differ in linguistic and…

Purpose: One challenge to the design and delivery of effective vocabulary intervention is the selection of vocabulary targets. The purpose of this study was to examine the relation of word characteristics to vocabulary learning from explicit vocabulary intervention. Method: This study was a secondary analysis of data from two recent efficacy…

Parent language input is a well-established predictor of child language development. Multisensory attention skills (MASks; intersensory matching, shifting and sustaining attention to audiovisual speech) are also known to be foundations for language development. However, due to a lack of appropriate measures, individual differences in these skills…

In bilingual children, more so than in monolingual children, comprehension abilities exceed production abilities. While this receptive-expressive gap in bilinguals has been well documented, little is known about its development. The present study tracked growth in the Spanish and English receptive and expressive vocabularies of 52 bilingual…

The current study investigated how high-skill spellers and low-skill spellers incidentally learn words during reading. The purpose of the study was to determine whether readers can use uninformative contexts to support word learning after forming a lexical representation for a novel word, consistent with instance-based resonance processes.…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine if a direct, explicit method of teaching vocabulary with the Vocabulary Scenario Technique -- General Education 16 Encounter (VSTGE16) protocol would yield gains in the vocabulary knowledge of fourth grade students in a general education classroom. Two research questions examined whether fourth…

Research suggests that elementary English Learners (ELs) benefit from interactive dual-language vocabulary instruction delivered one-on-one or in small groups. However, there are many barriers to providing this type of instruction to all ELs, including time constraints and bilingual teacher shortages. Thus, there is a high need for innovative,…

This mixed-methods study investigated elementary teachers' perceptions of curriculum-based readers theatre (CBRT) as a relevant approach for teaching English language learners (ELLs). I collected quantitative survey data from teachers who worked at the school with the largest population of ELLs in a large Florida school district. The survey…

This study aimed to describe 1-year changes in students' vocabulary in written narratives. Secondary aims included examination of accuracy and the relationship between lexical diversity and achievement. Participants included 749 students in first through eighth grades. Within-subjects 1-year change in diversity, productivity, and accuracy was…

Reading in difficult or novel fonts results in slower and less efficient reading (Slattery & Rayner, 2010); however, these fonts may also lead to better learning and memory (Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, & Vaughan, 2011). This effect is consistent with a desirable difficulty effect such that more effort during encoding results in better…

District leaders in a large urban school district in central Florida wanted to test the efficacy of a new curriculum designed to enhance the word knowledge of grade 5 students so as to improve reading achievement. The new curriculum, called Word Knowledge Instruction (WKI), consists of 15-minute lessons taught 4 days a week for 20 weeks. The…

This is the appendix for the report, "The Impact of Word Knowledge Instruction on Literacy Outcomes in Grade 5." District leaders in a large urban school district in central Florida wanted to examine the efficacy of a new curriculum designed to enhance the word knowledge of grade 5 students so as to improve reading achievement. The new…

The robust relation between maternal education and child language that is observed in monolingual populations has not been reliably replicated among bilingual children from immigrant families in the United States. We hypothesized that a variable that operates in immigrant populations--the language in which mothers achieved their highest level of…

The overarching goal of the new Florida State University/Haskins Laboratory/University of Connecticut Learning Disability (LD) Hub project is to align computational and behavioral theories of individual word reading development more closely with the challenges of learning to read a quasi-regular orthography (i.e., English) for both typically…