Cognate awareness is the ability to recognize the cognate relationship between words in two etymologically related languages. The current study examined the development of cognate awareness and its contribution to French (second language) reading comprehension among Canadian French immersion children. Eighty-one students were tested at the end of…

The present study aimed at characterizing what skilled or more proficient ESL college writing is in the Philippine setting through a contrastive analysis of three groups of variables identified from previous studies: resources, processes, and performance of ESL writers. Based on Chenoweth and Hayes' (2001; 2003) framework, the resource level…

The objectives of this study were twofold: (1) Determine the English proficiency of English second-language learners (ELLs) at the end of preschool as referenced to monolingual norms, and in particular, to determine if they showed an asynchronous profile, that is, approached monolingual norms more closely for some linguistic sub-skills than…

Background: The nature of speech disorders in individuals with Down Syndrome (DS) remains controversial despite various explanations put forth in the literature to account for the observed speech profiles. A high level of word production inconsistency in children with DS has led researchers to query whether the inconsistency continues into…

Various studies have noted that students enrolled in private schools in India perform better on average than students in government schools. In this paper, I show that large gaps in the test scores of children in private and public sector education are evident even at the point of initial enrollment in formal schooling and are associated with…

This study focuses on the degree of influence of one individual factor, namely gender, on the level of English competence attained in two different groups of intermediate-level Catalan Spanish adolescent learners of English as a foreign language: the first group (Group A) is 1 year younger and follows formal instruction (FI) and in parallel…

The present study explored the home literacy environment for Chinese ESL kindergarteners and examined the relationships between home literacy practices and language and literacy skills. Ninety Hong Kong Chinese ESL kindergarteners were assessed for English vocabulary, phonological awareness, letter knowledge and word reading. Their parents…

It is widely assumed that the British are poorer modern foreign language (MFL) learners than their fellow Europeans. Motivation has often been seen as the main cause of this perceived disparity in language learning success. However, there have also been suggestions that curricular and pedagogical factors may play a part. This article reports a…

This article reports an action research that intended to study to what extent students shape their writing skill in English through the use of a virtual room. As the study, we randomly selected six ninth graders in high school from thirty two students at a Colombian private institution. Three instruments were used, namely, interviews, students'…

The last decade has witnessed an increasing research trend on foreign language reading anxiety as a skill related to but distinct from foreign language anxiety. However, sources of foreign language reading anxiety have rarely been investigated. Thus, the current study responds to the study by (Saito, Horwitz, & Garza, 1999) and extends the…

Research Findings: The purpose of this study was to describe differences in the narratives produced by 3-, 4-, and 5- year old Spanish-speaking (SS) children. Narrative productions of 104 typically developing children were collected using a story-retelling task and coded using the Index of Narrative Complexity. The results of this study indicate…

This article presents results from a large population-based study of early communicative development in Norwegian children using an adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories, comprising 6574 children between 8 and 36 months. Data were collected via the Internet. In accordance with similar studies from other languages,…

The significance of using language learning strategies in general and vocabulary learning strategies in particular is quite clear to both language learners and language specialists. Being familiar with and making use of a range of different vocabulary learning strategies is a great aid for EAP learners in dealing with unknown words. The present…

Lervag and Hulme’s neuro-developmental theory and Wolf and Bowers’s double-deficit hypothesis were examined in this longitudinal study. A total of 130 children were tested in preschool and followed through fifth grade, when 84 remained in the study. During preschool and kindergarten the participants were given tests of end-sound discrimination…

This two-year longitudinal study tracks the extent of vocabulary attrition among Arabic-speaking English graduate teachers. Data were collected through pre-post tests of receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge. The results showed drastic attrition in vocabulary knowledge soon after the end of formal instruction followed by slight gain,…