Obtaining quick and reliable evidence regarding the proficiency of learners is a perennial issue in second language (L2) learning research. In this study, we examined naturalistic utterance recall as a measure of L2 learning proficiency that can be easily extracted from videos and automatically scored using the video's captions. In our recall…

There is no clear-cut division between orality and literacy (Street, 1993). This idea is central to literacy development in the Spanish heritage language (SHL) context because the opportunities to use heritage language (HL) skills are often oral, not written. Furthermore, the cultural situations that speakers find for their language are less…

Four waves of Cuban immigrants have arrived to the United States from the early 1960s with the fourth wave still in progress. The changing reasons these immigrants fled Cuba have resulted in diverse characteristics for each wave of immigration. This qualitative study investigated Cuban American students' perceptions of their cultural background…

In the context of language instruction and learning, willingness to communicate (WTC) is an important factor in learners' language use. It is viewed as a volitional process influenced by individual, social, linguistic, and situationally dependent factors. Foundational research focused on trait and state WTC-influencing factors as separate…

Previous comprehension studies using Picture Matching Tasks (PMT) have shown that, by the age of four, Spanish-speaking children have acquired the semantics of "estar" being able to calculate the implicature that a property introduced with "estar" does not hold independent of time as well as displaying some ability to integrate…

Choices regarding how signs are displayed in schools send messages regarding the status of languages and speakers of those languages. The monolingual paradigm can be implicitly reified by the position, shape, color, etc. of languages in relation to English on school signage (Przymus & Kohler, 2018). This can have a negative impact for…

This study investigated the relationship among intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness in the speech of second language learners of Spanish of varying proficiency in instructed contexts. It conceptually replicated studies by Munro and Derwing (1995a) and Derwing and Munro (1997), who found partial independence among the three speech…

The simple view of reading (SVR) model proposes that reading comprehension is the product of cognitive domain skills, word decoding, and oral language (linguistic) comprehension, and that decoding and language comprehension make separate, independent contributions to reading comprehension. The SVR has been supported in both first (L1) and second…

Background: The people with Down syndrome who are now adolescents can face a self-report questionnaire with guarantees of being answered with validity to evaluate areas of development that traditionally have not been able to be evaluated. This is the case of emotional intelligence, measured in this research with the Emotional Quotient Inventory:…

A new technique to teach language grammar is proposed. It consists of the blending of two previously existing techniques--VanPatten's (1996) Processing Instruction (PI) and Adair-Hauck and Donato's (2002) Presentation, Attention, Co-construct, and Extension (PACE) Model. The result is the S-PACE Model, which incorporates the whole-language…

According to Instituto Cervantes (2017), there are more Spanish speakers living in the United States than there are Spanish speakers in Spain. Tragically, many Spanish-speaking English Language Learners (ELLs) are failing in American schools (Huerta, Tong, Irby, & Lara-Alecio, 2016; Lichon & Dees, 2018). Yet, Catholic schools have…

Promoting quality of life (QOL) has become a goal of support services for people with disabilities and a key intervention outcome. The aim of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the adapted Spanish version of the Cerebral Palsy Quality of Life Questionnaire (CP QOL) for children and adolescents, in its self-report and primary…

The main objective of this study was to explore the benefits of the use of educational audio-visual materials in facilitating learning for students with hearing loss. The study analysed whether students with hearing loss had a visual learning preference when they watched an audio-visual and if the images present contributed to the retention of…

Latin American families' history and life experiences impact the priorities and values the families have for their children with disabilities. It may be beneficial for early intervention (EI) providers to explore and integrate Latin American families' backgrounds to improve EI services. We completed a qualitative interview study using a collective…

In classrooms, teachers play a fundamental role in managing students' participation. As part of their classroom interactional competence to maximize interactional space for students' learning, teachers use multimodal resources to orchestrate turn-taking, allocate the next speaker, and manage repair sequences. However, little is known about how…