Accurately identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in students who speak a home language other than English has proven to be an enduring challenge. Consequently, students with DLD miss out on critical interventions, and those who are acquiring their two languages in a typical manner are placed in settings that do not meet their…

This paper reports on the process of developing an original framework for conceptualising and measuring language learner well-being within the context of heritage language (HL) learning. Drawing on a quantitative validation study with 545 young Chinese heritage language (CHL) learners, aged 7-18, in the UK, this paper presents an empirically…

Evaluating students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds (i.e., emergent bilinguals) presents challenges to evaluation teams, as distinguishing between a language disorder and typical second language development is more complex. The skills and knowledge required to do this task often exceed the level of training that evaluators…

Bilingual children's total vocabulary in each of their languages is often smaller than that of monolinguals. In their seminal study, Bialystok et al. (2010. 'Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual children.' "Bilingualism: Language and Cognition" 13 (4): 525-531) divided children's vocabulary into 'home' and…

The present paper aims to investigate the interplay of lexical and grammatical development in school-aged Greek-Albanian bilingual children by providing evidence both from majority, Greek, and heritage, Albanian. To this end, 47 8 to 10-year-old bilingual children were tested by means of expressive vocabulary tests in Greek and in Albanian, while…

Young learners' language aptitude is understudied due to a lack of tests covering this period of life. Young learners, in contrast with adults, are still acquiring their L1. Consequently, a language-dependent aptitude test should be carefully designed for it to be valid. An additional challenge is found when the young learners who are to take the…

The ACTFL Assessment of Performance Toward Proficiency in Languages (AAPPL, https://www.actfl.n.d.org/assessments/k-12-assessments/aappl) assesses proficiency in 11 languages for students in grades 3 to 12 and is often used to award the Seal of Biliteracy. While arguments for the valid interpretation and uses of the AAPPL have previously been…

Purpose: There is a shortage of bilingual speech-language pathologists (SLPs) in the United States. For Vietnamese, less than 1% of SLPs speak the language compared with a Vietnamese American population of > 2.1 million. This study examines the feasibility and social validity of remote child language assessment with the help of a caregiver to…

This article uses cognitive measures previously developed within linguistic relativity research to explore the thinking patterns of Yucatec Maya-Spanish bilingual children in the Yucatan peninsula. These measures were designed to detect cognitive patterns associated with specific language patterns. Here, these measures are used to test whether 12…

Three experiments explored how retrieval practice and corrective feedback affect a third language (L3) vocabulary learning. In the first two experiments, Chinese-English bilinguals without prior French language experience studied English (Second Language, L2)--French (L3) word pairs in repeated studying or retrieval practice without (Experiment…

Previous research identified that studying texts in a second language (L2) as opposed to the first (L1) results in substantially weaker recall. We hypothesized that use of advance organizers (AOs) might attenuate this L2 recall cost by supporting L2 users in the construction of more solid memory representations. One hundred Dutch-English…

Reading is a very complex task in which readers obtain information to promote reading from not only the fixated word located in the foveal area but also non-fixated words located in the parafoveal area. We aimed to investigate the second language (L2) parafoveal orthographic (letter identity and letter position) processing mechanism adopting the…

The objective of this study was to validate a bilingual Spanish-English version of the Vocabulary Size Test (VST) considering its potential use as a discriminator between learners in terms of language competence. This version was designed based on the two forms available on one of the creators' websites as well as considering practices recommended…

This study investigated three key issues in heritage language (HL) research. Previous research shows HL speakers have an advantage on oral production tasks compared to L2 speakers who instead perform better on written tasks. Furthermore, both L2 and HL speakers are claimed to have a "yes-bias" towards retaining ungrammaticality in GJTs.…

The Vocabulary Size Test (VST) measures English learners' decontextualised receptive vocabulary knowledge of written English and has nine bilingual versions with multiple-choice options written in other languages. This study used the English-Japanese version of the VST to investigate the extent to which loanword items were answered correctly by…