Background: Numerous higher education institutions worldwide have adopted English-language-medium computer science courses and integrated online problem-solving competitions to bridge gaps in theory and practice (Alhamami "Education and Information Technologies," 2021; 26: 6549-6562). Objectives: This study aimed to investigate the…

Purpose: There is a shortage of available methods to accurately inform the developmental status of children whose cultural and linguistic backgrounds vary from the mainstream. The purpose of this review article was to describe different approaches used to support the accurate characterization of speech, language, and functional communication in…

Purpose: The aim of this pilot feasibility study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the group VietSpeech SuperSpeech program targeting speech skills and home language maintenance via telepractice. Method: In Stage 1, using a case-control design, 30 Vietnamese-English-speaking children were assessed in English and Vietnamese, and parents…

If a child asks a friend to play football and the friend replies, 'I have a cough', the requesting child must make a 'relevance inference' to determine the communicative intent. Relevance inferencing is a key component of pragmatics, that is, the ability to integrate social context into language interpretation and use. We tested which cognitive…

This study assessed the status of te reo Maori, the indigenous language of New Zealand, in the context of New Zealand English. From a broadly representative sample of 6327 two-year-olds ("Growing Up in New Zealand"), 6090 mothers (96%) reported their children understood English, and 763 mothers (12%) reported their children understood…

In this study, we examined whether interpreters and interpreting trainees are better predisposed to respeaking than people with no interpreting skills. We tested 57 participants (22 interpreters, 23 translators and 12 controls) while respeaking 5-minute videos with two parameters: speech rate (fast/slow) and number of speakers (one/many). Having…

Cooperative learning allows students acquisition of competences that are essential for the labour market such as leadership, critical thinking, communication, and so on. For this reason, different cooperative activities were designed in a language subject in English Studies so that students could work in groups and acquire those competences. This…

Sentence repetition (SR) tasks have been used to measure children's expressive language skills in normal and abnormal language development, and to examine the development of the speaking skills in second language acquisition, as well as to survey the proficiency of bilingual language development. Recently, SR tasks have been recognized as a…

How to compute and report subscores for a test that was originally designed for reporting scores on a unidimensional scale has been a topic of interest in recent years. In the research reported here, we describe an application of multidimensional item response theory to identify a subscore structure in a test designed for reporting results using a…

As English has increasingly become associated with social and economic power in the context of globalisation, there has been a growing concern regarding achievement gaps in English that appear to be correlated to learners' socio-economic status (SES). The present study aims to examine how parents' SES and their behaviours and beliefs about English…

This paper presents a case study of using blended learning to enhance students' language skills and learner autonomy in an Asian university environment. Blended learning represents an educational environment for much of the world where computers and the Internet are readily available. It combines self-study with valuable face-to-face interaction…

Lexical items, because they are language specific forms are undoubtedly one of the most difficult tasks in learning a second language. Phrasal verbs perhaps further exacerbate this difficult task since the meaning of already known verbs changes drastically when combined with different particles. Hence, facilitating the learning of these commonly…

Forty-one French-English bilinguals in England and France participated in three segmentation experiments with English and French materials. Bilinguals formed two groups, defined by forced choice of a dominant language. Only the French-dominant group showed syllabic segmentation and only with French language materials. The English-dominant group…

Analysis of 12 Scottish and 12 American 3- to 6-year-olds interacting with adults indicated that, because Scottish adults use the present perfect tense more frequently in their speech to children than American adults do, Scottish children use the tense in their speech long before American children do. (Author/CB)

The requirements for English language skills at the British Key Stage 2 curriculum level rise so steeply that it seems possible that many African Caribbean students may not be able to demonstrate their true competence. A rigid move toward standard English can be detrimental to minority group students. (SLD)