Purpose: The purpose of this study was to test the efficacy of the Teaching Early Literacy and Language (TELL) curriculum package for improving the early literacy and oral language skills of preschoolers from low-income families. Method: In a randomized controlled trial (RCT), TELL was implemented in 30 TELL and 28 business-as-usual classrooms.…

The home environment and experiences before a child enters formal schooling have a significant impact on their educational progress and results. Most research in this area has been conducted in Western countries and may differ across different countries and cultures. The purpose of this study is to investigate how literacy skills are developed in…

Language testing research has suggested that placement accuracy can be an important factor in the consequences of placement decision-making. However, previous studies primarily have used a one-shot teacher judgment of placement accuracy, suffering from a lack of students' perspectives of their time-varying experiences. The present study aimed to…

Practitioners are encouraged to apply theories of reading development to psychoeducational test interpretation. Orthographic mapping provides an explanation of the acquisition of sight words. Although many test batteries provide tasks for practitioners to assess reading components associated with orthographic mapping, the relationship among…

To examine the effects of task repetition with different schedules, English-as-a-foreign-language classroom learners performed the same oral narrative task six times under three different schedules. They narrated the same six-frame cartoon story (a) six times consecutively in one class (massed practice), (b) three times at the beginning and at the…

An important part of the grammatical proficiency of students learning Turkish as a foreign language is the use of verb complements in terms of case suffixes used with verbs. The suffixes that determine the relations between nouns and verbs that make up the two main word categories of Turkish are case suffixes. Noun case suffixes, whose main…

The German school system employs centrally organized performance assessments (some of which are called "VERA") as a way of promoting lesson development. In recent years, several German federal states introduced a computer-based performance testing system which will replace the paper-pencil testing system in the future. Scores from…

This study intends to contribute to the methodological debate into L2 pragmatics research by examining the usability of immersive virtual reality (VR) for developing a pragmatics task. The study compared participants' speech act performance between two closed role-play tasks using different mediums: computer-based and VR-based. Sixty-two native…

Spoken word poetry encourages youth to engage in identity construction, resist oppression and construct counternarratives. Through participating in community-based slams, school workshops and online events, young people can take part in visible activism through exploring their own identity, power and agency and seeing themselves as change agents.…

Background and aims: Although adjustment of the environment is recommended as a support strategy in evidence-based interventions for children with autism, the impact of doing so (and the how and why) is not well understood. One essential environmental factor to consider when providing supports for preschool-aged autistic children is the play…

In this article, we examine the underexplored link between teacher sense-making and professional development on paired literacy approaches. Grounded in a year-long qualitative study in a Dual Language Bilingual Education (DLBE) program in Massachusetts, we recount the experiences of dual language teachers learning about and implementing a…

The present systematic review examines Glenn Fulcher's contributions, works, philosophy, and research in language testing and assessment. The data includes his published articles, book chapters, books and interviews (except the one in this special issue) relevant to language testing and assessment from 1987 to March 2022. This study is conducted…

Purpose: Manual sign is a common alternative mode of communication taught to children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). Gesture use is positively related to later increases in vocabulary and syntactic complexity in typical development, but there is little evidence supporting the use of manual sign for children with CAS. We sought to identify…

Studying the oral language growth of Spanish-speaking preschoolers in the United States is increasingly important given the critical role early language development plays in reading outcomes. In this article, we report on the Spanish and English growth trajectories observed in 124 bilingual preschoolers collected over 2 years in 36 classrooms…

Over the last 25 years, scholars have proposed several recommendations for including spoken grammar in second language classrooms. However, recent studies point to potential challenges in this endeavour: learners may feel inauthentic when using what they see as 'native-speaker' forms, and interlocutors may see these forms as less acceptable when…