Purpose: Early Interventions in Reading (Vaughn et al., 2006), the only literacy intervention with demonstrated effectiveness for U.S. dual language learners, was enhanced to support the development of oral language (vocabulary, grammar, and narrative) and literacy, which we refer to as "Language and Literacy Together." The primary focus…

This study examines elicited imitation (EI) both as a measure of implicit grammatical knowledge and more global semantic and syntactic knowledge. It also examines whether length affects the difficulty of EI tests when they contain both grammatical and ungrammatical items. Fifty language learners took an EI test and an oral narrative task. The data…

Lindseth (2016) reported that direct instruction and practice using the German verb-inversion rule resulted in higher accuracy in an oral test for college students, supporting the hypothesis that explicit linguistic knowledge can become implicit linguistic knowledge. It is quite likely, however, that the conditions for the use of conscious…

The ability to interact with others has gained recognition as part of the L2 speaking construct in the assessment literature and in high- and low-stakes speaking assessments. This paper first presents a review of the literature on interactional competence (IC) in L2 learning and assessment. It then discusses a particular feature--"producing…

This article on interactional competence provides an overview of the historical influences that have shaped theoretical conceptualisations of this construct as it relates to spoken language use, leading to the current view of it as involving both cognitive and social dimensions, and then describes its operationalisation in tests and assessment…

There is a growing demand for online course options, including classes offered and required in foreign languages. However, offering courses in multiple formats presents the challenges of developing high quality online courses and assessing the overall program effectiveness as students may elect to take the sequenced language acquisition courses in…

Easy and rapid access to the Internet, the affordances of Web 2.0 tools and technological advances, such as smartphone applications, have rendered informal contact with English an undisputed reality. This out-of-class contact without the primary or conscious objective of language learning has been the focus of recent research into the field of…

This study employed narrative inquiry to understand the oral English learning motivation of Chinese international students with low oral English proficiency through their academic acculturation stories. Expectancy-value theory served as the theoretical framework to inform the study design and the interpretation of results. Findings suggest all…

Problem/Purpose: Young children with developmental speech and/or language impairment (DSLI) often fail to develop important oral language and early literacy skills that are foundational for subsequent schooling and reading success. The purpose of this investigation was to examine the efficacy of the TELL curriculum and associated evidence-based…

This book presents an international range of conversation analytic (CA) studies of classroom interaction which all discuss their empirical findings in terms of their theoretical and methodological contribution to the field of second language studies and their potential pedagogical relevance. The volume is thus unique in its focus on the…

The topic of this article is the link between research on the neurocognition of the teaching--acquisition interface and research on second language teaching. This recent scientific enterprise investigates whether and how different aspects of second language instruction may change both the anatomy and the functioning of an adult learner's brain…

Oral narrative retelling is a complex linguistic and cognitive task that has been shown to map onto reading fluency and comprehension. Therefore, it is important to understand oral retelling skill, especially among "emergent bilingual" children--those who are learning two languages simultaneously. In this article, exploratory…

This paper first surveys three kinds of learner interview corpora (LINDSEI, NICT-JLE Corpus, and Trinity Lancaster Corpus), paying particular attention to their interview structures. Then, it explains the principles and features of the ICNALE Spoken Dialogue (ICNALE SD), which includes 425 videos and approximately 1.6-million-word transcripts of…

The present study examined the extent to which first language (L1) awareness can benefit second language (L2) grammatical learning of the French "Imparfait", a crosslinguistically complex target feature. Sixty-nine English-speaking learners of L2 French received different types of explicit information (EI) about L2 or L2 + L1…

An Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) may be evaluated either during the interview procedure (direct-method) or from a tape-made oral interaction (semi-direct method). Such variety in methods of assessment can influence test takers' scores extensively. However, it is not conclusive whether such differences are due to test format or something else.…