This article critiques the current arrangements for the assessment and testing of English in early-years settings and primary schools in England. It is broadly supportive of the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile. It is highly critical of the Year 1 phonics check, and of the tests of reading and of grammar, punctuation and spelling at the end of…

Since it is a productive skill, writing is considered one of the most crucial abilities in communication; nonetheless, EFL learners have difficulty composing texts which are both communicatively and linguistically competent. This study intends to explore the benefits of using authentic materials in EFL learners, with an emphasis on writing skills.…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the story writing skills of adults with a history of oral language impairment. It was hypothesized that writing text would pose difficulty for adults with a history of language impairment (LI), and that this difficulty would manifest itself as reduced grammatical complexity and increased errors in…

This article describes the use of African American English (AAE) in the written and oral language of African American adolescents who struggle with writing. Written and oral language samples of 22 African American 10th-grade students were transcribed, analyzed, and coded for AAE, grammatical errors, spelling errors, and punctuation errors. Four…

This article reports some outcomes from an exploratory study that compares children diagnosed with ADHD and without language impairment with typically developing children for aspects of language use. Discourse analysis based on a systemic functional linguistics approach is applied to spoken and written samples from three different text types that…

A study examined patterns of English usage in 52 Japanese university freshmen's written compositions, particularly in the use of the subordinating conjunction "because." It was found that students often fragmented sentences when "because" was involved, or used a comma to separate a trailing dependent "because" clause…