One of the consequences of the growing number of English-taught programmes offered by European universities is the top-down request that lecturers switch from their L1 to English, for teaching, while the administrative staff is required to communicate with international students. To help the academic staff cope with the change, some universities…

Being able to read and write in English as a second language (L2) in the globalized world has been increasingly considered important to gain greater personal, academic, and business achievement. This study investigates English (L2) reading and writing abilities in relation to first language (L1) reading and writing abilities, L2 vocabulary…

In the realm of language proficiency assessments, the domain description inference and the extrapolation inference are key components of a validity argument. Biber et al.'s description of the lexicogrammatical features of the spoken and written registers in the T2K-SWAL corpus has served as support for the TOEFL iBT test's domain description and…

Cinquain is a poetic form, or stanza, of five lines that do not rhyme, which follows some strict rules. Cinquain is also considered to be a training means, a method, a technique, an instrument used for reflection, for synthesis of all knowledge on a particular topic (a being, an object, an ensemble of objects), towards developing one's creativity.…

Linguistic alignment--the contingent reuse of our interlocutors' language at all levels of linguistic structure--pervades human dialogue. Here, we design unique measures to capture the degree of linguistic alignment between interlocutors' linguistic representations at three levels of structure: lexical, syntactic, and semantic. We track these…

Derivational knowledge is associated with writing and speaking skills. These skills are essential for EFL students who express themselves in oral presentations or written assignments. Therefore, diagnostic measurement of productive derivational knowledge is of vital importance, especially in regard to the most frequent 1,000 word families that…

We examined the concurrent relationship between narrative skills (the Renfrew Bus Story Test) and core language measures (vocabulary, grammar and verbal memory) at age 4 and the longitudinal relationship between core language and listening comprehension skills at age 7 in a sample of 215 children using latent variables and structural equation…

Speech fluency has been extensively researched as a core construct for second language (L2) speaking assessment. Despite the broad consensus on its multifaceted nature, few researchers have empirically explored the dimensionality of this construct. Operationalizations of fluency vary across research and practice, using both holistic and…

To have more information about the English words known by second language (L2) speakers, we ran a large-scale crowdsourcing vocabulary test, which yielded 17 million useful responses. It provided us with a list of 445 words known to nearly all participants. The list was compared to various existing lists of words advised to include in the first…

The purpose of this study was to classify Korean readers into subgroups based on their reading achievement and to examine the relationships between these subgroups and a set of cognitive-linguistic variables. The reading achievement and cognitive-linguistic skills of 394 elementary school students were measured and the data were analyzed by…

Previous work has noted that some children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) display weaknesses in receptive vocabulary relative to expressive vocabulary abilities. The current study extended previous work by examining the receptive-expressive vocabulary profile in boys with idiopathic ASD and boys with concomitant ASD and fragile X syndrome…

In the present study, we compared the extent to which linguistic comprehension (vocabulary and listening comprehension) and word reading explain reading comprehension differentially for English learners (ELs) and non-ELs with reading difficulties. We also investigated whether different mechanisms of reading comprehension failure exist for each…

In the last decades, many research projects have indicated that, especially for children with mathematical difficulties, procedural training programs seem to be very helpful in promoting learning of multiplicative routines such as the times table. However, there is less knowledge about whether and how a conceptual understanding of multiplication…

The purpose of this study was to examine the shared, direct, and indirect contributions of three metalinguistic skills (phonological awareness, morphological awareness, orthographic knowledge) to the reading comprehension abilities of struggling adult readers. Across studies, these three metalinguistic skills have individually emerged as important…

This study examined how teachers and paraprofessionals in 126 kindergarten-second grade general and special education classrooms talked with their 194 students with autism, and further, how individual student characteristics in language, autism symptoms, and social abilities influenced this talk. Using systematic observational methods and factor…