This study used a mixed methods research design to examine teachers' perceptions of and knowledge about Universal Design for Learning (UDL). It specifically investigated whether participant teachers viewed the UDL instructional model as one that has the potential to improve student outcomes and whether the training in UDL was sufficient to allow…

Research on native Arabic speakers' perception of non-native English phonemic contrasts has manifested various conclusions. Some studies have revealed that native Arabic speakers experience difficulty in the perception of non-native English phonemic contrasts, where others have concluded that they largely do not experience such difficulty. Due to…

Previous research has shown that talker identity and speaking style affect the processing of morphosyntactic violations. The present study examined whether speaking style modulates comprehension and subsequent production of case variants in German prepositional phrases across the life span. To this end, we conducted a sentence repetition and…

From limited evidence, children track the regularities of their language impressively fast and they infer generalized rules that apply to novel instances. This study investigated what drives the inductive leap from memorizing specific items and statistical regularities to extracting abstract rules. We propose an innovative entropy model that…

Linguistic contexts provide useful information about verb meanings by narrowing the space of candidate concepts. Intuitively, the more information, the better. For example, "the tall girl is 'fezzing,'" as compared to "the girl is fezzing," provides more information about which event, out of multiple candidate events, is being…

In this teacher-research study I examine factors influencing willingness to communicate (WTC) on 39 students, grades 1-6, enrolled in after-school English as a foreign language (EFL) classes in Korea. Quantitative data from student surveys, was analyzed to identify student perceptions of their comfort when engaged in various types of communicative…

There is robust evidence that reading aloud with young children can help them learn new vocabulary. Building upon prior research, this study tested the effects of "both" book text features "and" readers' spontaneous extra-textual word-highlighting strategies on 3- to 4-year-olds' vocabulary retention from repeated read alouds…

Background: Attitudes of classmates has been considered as one of the major problems in inclusive education, negatively influencing the participation of students with disability in school contexts. The goal of this study was to examine Italian typically developing children's attitudes towards their peers with disabilities. Method: In a sample of…

Research has investigated how lexical-semantic and participant factors impact word learning in young children and adults. However, limited information pertaining to expressive vocabulary development exists for school-aged bilinguals--particularly those with developmental language disorder (DLD). Cross-linguistic differences in the semantic…

The field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) has observed how interest-driven extramural English (EE), an outside-of-classroom engagement with English (Sundqvist, 2009), can facilitate language development. Research supports the potential EE has when brought into formal English language teaching (ELT) settings; However,…

In the United States, political polarization has increased markedly since 2000, with consequences for local governments and state-level policymaking. Redistricting, and the role of social media as the dominant source of information for many in the U.S. has contributed to state and national legislatures that reflect more extreme political views. A…

Scaffolding has been shown to facilitate students' text comprehension and task performance. Yet less is known about the necessity of scaffolding for competent students reading unfamiliar content. To explore that question, we investigated the effects of two knowledge scaffolding techniques (i.e., mobilization and concept mapping) versus control on…

Glosses have been assumed to be effective for developing vocabulary. This article discusses a within-subject quasi-experiment which investigated the relative effectiveness of four vocabulary gloss types: L1 gloss, L1 gloss with phonological guidance, L2 gloss, and L2 gloss with phonological guidance. The participants were 63 Iranian undergraduate…

As immigrants enter a new country, their arrival generally results in demographic shifts that may challenge the perceptions of native-born members of the resident population. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between awareness of racism and privilege awareness in native-born students at a university located in a Southern…

Children who rapidly recognize and interpret familiar words typically have accelerated lexical growth, providing indirect evidence that lexical processing efficiency (LPE) is related to word-learning ability. Here we directly tested whether children with better LPE are better able to learn novel words. In Experiment 1, 17- and 30-month-olds were…