Research with school-age readers suggests that the contributions of reading and language skills vary across reading comprehension assessments and proficiency levels. With a sample of 168 struggling adult readers, we estimated the explanatory effects of decoding, oral vocabulary, listening comprehension, fluency, background knowledge, and…

Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) Skills is a web-based assessment system published by Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA). The test publishers purport that MAP Skills provides information about essential K-8 building blocks in Language Usage, Mathematics, Reading Comprehension, and Vocabulary to quickly assess student progress toward…

I propose an integrative theoretical framework for reading and writing acquisition, called the interactive dynamic literacy model, after reviewing theoretical models of reading and writing, and recent efforts in integrating theoretical models within reading and writing, respectively. The central idea of the interactive dynamic literacy model is…

Bilingualism appears to be related to poor language and reading comprehension in the instructional language (L2). However, in the long term, an early age of second language acquisition (AoA) may produce higher levels of second language skills than a later onset of L2 exposure. Most studies on school-aged second language learners (L2 learners)…

International studies have documented large effects of SES on oral language competence and researchers have suggested that differences in oral language competence at school entry may be one factor contributing to educational disadvantage. The current study made use of data provided by the Growing Up in Ireland survey in order to quantify the…

With the increased emphasis in communicative language learning and task-based language teaching, classroom assessment increasingly includes performance-based assessments (e.g., essays, speeches, projects, presentations), which require careful planning and can be challenging to implement and assess. The ability to design and use well-designed…

The study evaluated a recently postponed national test policy on the use of external agencies' English tests measuring four skills for Japanese university admission purposes. Using Kunnan's principles of fairness and justice, we generated and evaluated three claims regarding the test policy: vocabulary coverage of the tests, the justifiability of…

Purpose: We examined receptive verb knowledge in 22- to 24-month-old toddlers with a dynamic video eye-tracking test. The primary goal of the study was to examine the utility of eye-gaze measures that are commonly used to study noun knowledge for studying verb knowledge. Method: Forty typically developing toddlers participated. They viewed 2…

Mandarin classifiers are a complex system, but little is known about how Mandarin-speaking children manage to learn the system. Based on the extant literature, we explored potential factors influencing the comprehension and production of Mandarin shape classifiers, including classifier-based semantic categorization and errors pertaining to the…

Narrative production draws upon linguistic, cognitive and pragmatic skills, and is subject to substantial individual differences. This study aimed to characterise the development of narrative production in late childhood and to assess whether children's cumulative experience of reading fiction is associated with individual differences in narrative…

General measures of process quality are widely used in the early childhood education (ECE) field. However, the evidence regarding associations between the most widely used process quality measure, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS; Pianta et al., 2008), and children's school readiness gains during the preschool year is mixed. Using…

The development of preschoolers' language skills is influenced by literacy environments and individual differences in storybook exposure. Extant research is limited as most studies (a) investigate the effects on lower level language (LLL; e.g., vocabulary, grammar), but not the effects on higher level language (HLL; e.g., comprehension monitoring,…

The "unskilled and unaware effect" refers to the finding that individuals who are less knowledgeable or less skilled in a domain are relatively less able to evaluate their level of skill or effectively utilise feedback relative to individuals who are more skilled. Studies finding deaf students less accurate than hearing students in…

This paper outlines and details historical L2 curriculum development for segments of China's State education system over a ten-year period beginning with the start of the Sino -- Foreign joint programs classes in 2011. A two-year post assessment from 2015-2017. Tracking students continuing test results for both the CET (College English Test)…

Students' grasp of the non-mathematical language in a mathematics story problem--such as vocabulary and syntax--may have an important effect on their problem-solving, and this may be particularly true for students with weaker language skills. However, little experimental research has examined which individual language features influence students'…