This article explores whether struggling readers from different primary language backgrounds differ in response to phonologically based remediation. Following random assignment to one of three reading interventions or to a special education reading control program, reading and reading-related outcomes of 166 struggling readers were assessed…

Preventing reading difficulties in the early grades has been a topic of interest for more than a decade. Research has clearly delineated the components needed for early literacy programs to be effective in teaching nearly all children to learn to read. Teacher educators have a responsibility to ensure that candidates gain extensive knowledge about…

In this study, we compare the first and the last sessions from an online oral proficiency course aimed at doctoral students conducted in the virtual world Second Life. The study attempts to identify how supportive moves made by the teacher encourage learners to engage with language, and what type of linguistic behaviour in the learners leads to…

Background: Studies of language in children with mild-to-moderate hearing impairment (HI) indicate that they often have problems in phonological short-term memory (PSTM) and that they have linguistic weaknesses both in vocabulary and morphosyntax similar to children with specific language impairment (SLI). However, children with HI may be more…

Drawing on the evidence of a growing body of corpus research over the past two decades, this article investigates the phenomenon of spoken grammar in conversational English and the extent to which our current knowledge of the area is reflected in contemporary textbooks for English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. The article reports on a…

This study examines the Daily Oral Language (DOL) program aimed at helping students learn mechanics of writing through daily editing exercises. This nine-month study sought to determine if DOL improved editing skills and actual writing skills of seventy fourth-grade students. While the results of this study did not statistically demonstrate the…

Insights from corpus linguistics have come to be seen as having a significant impact in second language pedagogy. Learner corpora, or collections of texts spoken or written by non-native speakers (NNS) of a language, are now being used for the purposes of enhancing language teaching. Specifically, by comparing the corpus of NNS with native…

This investigation examined whether access to sign language as a medium for instruction influences theory of mind (ToM) reasoning in deaf children with similar home language environments. Experiment 1 involved 97 deaf Italian children ages 4-12 years: 56 were from deaf families and had LIS (Italian Sign Language) as their native language, and 41…

The writing performance of 64 elementary school children with a history of specific language impairment was examined to evaluate both the nature of the children's difficulties with writing and the relationship between oral language, reading, and writing. Children were assessed at age 8 on a range of language, literacy, and cognitive measures and…

"Ready, Set, Leap!"[R] is a preschool curriculum that focuses on early reading skills, such as phonemic awareness, letter knowledge, and letter-sound correspondence, using multisensory technology that incorporates touch, sight, and sound. Teachers may adopt either a theme-based or a literature-based teaching approach, and for each…

The possibility of teaching communication strategies and the feasibility of incorporating them into school syllabi have been a controversial issue. In the current study, 60 Iranian students were divided into two thirty-member classes; then two different textbooks, one with specific CS and the other without them, were chosen to be taught in the…

Self-repetition is commonly found in spoken discourse, and it could be argued that it is an interactional necessity. Self-repetition in spontaneous talk is pervasive and performs a variety of functions. Some regard it as signalling redundancy, disfluency, or both, in spoken language, whereas others consider it to be facilitating the production of…

In an example of the redundancy effect, learning is inhibited when written and spoken text containing the same information is presented simultaneously rather than in written or spoken form alone. The current research was designed to investigate whether the redundancy effect applied to reading comprehension in English as a foreign language (EFL) by…

This paper focuses on the rationale and underlying processes of an Inter/intranet tool designed to evaluate oral tests and especially the university entrance examination according to the national minimal requirements. This exam is taken by up to 100,000 students simultaneously. This presentation gives information of the tool design and up-to-now…

Responsive information is one of the factors that determine the quality of higher education. The factor is especially important for eLearning where a direct communication between a lecturer and a student is replaced with a virtual one. How may a qualitative responsive information, in other words feedback (see the definitions of key words), help…