In contrast to the large body of research investigating intervention for poor decoding skills, far fewer studies have evaluated interventions for reading comprehension. There is even less research on children with more specific difficulties with reading comprehension, often referred to as "poor comprehenders". Levels of effectiveness…

Recent ERP research with adults has shown that the online processing of subject-verb (S-V) agreement violations is mediated by the relative perceptual salience of the violation (Dube et al. 2016). These findings corroborate infant perception research, which has also shown that perceptual salience influences infants' sensitivity to grammatical…

This study aimed to profile the sublexical, lexical, and text level language skills, and cognitive processes of a sub-group of children with poor reading comprehension known as poor comprehenders. An assessment protocol was developed to assess each of the components from Perfetti and Stafura's Reading Systems Framework. A comprehensive profile was…

The use of integrated tasks to test English-speaking skills raises questions about the impact of comprehension on test score outcomes, and the impact of stimulus materials on test-taker strategic behaviours. This study analysed speaking performances and verbal report data to examine the strategies used by test takers at different levels of…

This study investigates the relationship between performances on the speaking component of the TOEFL iBTTM with performances on academic oral assessment tasks. For the academic tasks, we recorded and transcribed the performances of five local and five high-achieving international undergraduate students on oral assessment tasks in core first-year…

This study used elicited production methodology to investigate the negative sentences that are produced by English-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI). Negative sentences were elicited in contexts in which adults use the negative auxiliary verb doesn't (e.g., "It doesn't fit"). This form was targeted to see how…

Studies on apologies have proliferated in pragmatics research, but little research has been conducted on apology responses (ARs). The present inquiry contributes to filling the gap in the literature, and it does so by examining such responses in two languages, Australian English (AE) and Bahasa Indonesia (BI). The study ultimately focuses on two…

The assessment of oral language is now quite commonly done in pairs or groups, and there is a growing body of research which investigates the related issues (e.g. May, 2007). Writing generally tends to be thought of as an individual activity, although a small number of studies have documented the advantages of collaboration in writing in the…

Investigates effect of task type on resultant candidate discourse and input of the interlocutor. The experimental design ensured an information gap in one of the interview tasks for prospective immigrants to Australia. Findings indicate that candidate discourse differs in quantity and quality between situations when an information gap exists and…

Some children have difficulty in perceiving differences between sounds, even though they have normal hearing sensitivity, and it has been suggested that such problems could lead to difficulties in language and literacy development. Poor ability to distinguish sounds on the basis of frequency (perceived as pitch) has been described in poor readers…

This paper focuses on an information gap task that was part of a larger critical action research project that sought to expand talk opportunities for children in multilingual classrooms. Little of the previous research on tasks and language learning has focused on children learning English as an additional language in the context of diverse,…

This report documents two coordinated exploratory studies into the nature of oral English-for-academic-purposes (EAP) proficiency. Study I used verbal-report methodology to examine field experts? rating orientations, and Study II investigated the quality of test-taker discourse on two different Test of English as a Foreign Language? (TOEFL®) task…