Learning from expository texts demands the processing of metatextual cues (rhetorical devices) and the activating of reading strategies. The main objective of this study was to examine whether profiting from written metatextual cues to launch reading strategies needs higher level of rhetorical competence than profiting from oral cues.…

Background and aims: Humans communicate primarily through spoken language and speech perception is a core function of the human auditory system. Among the autistic community, atypical sensory reactivity and social communication difficulties are pervasive, yet the research literature lacks in-depth self-report data on speech perception in this…

This study addressed the language in professional communication and national identity of civil servants-bilinguals in the Ukrainian border oblasts with Russia. It was empirically determined that the civil servants mainly use the Ukrainian language in professional communication with the users of civil services, but with colleagues, the Russian…

Engaging in frequent, meaningful conversation during the early years of schooling is foundational for children's literacy development. Specifically, developing oral language through daily conversations is essential for language comprehension, and eventually, reading comprehension. In this article, we discuss how teachers can use the…

Engaging in frequent, meaningful conversation during the early years of schooling is foundational for children's literacy development. Specifically, developing oral language through daily conversations is essential for language comprehension, and eventually, reading comprehension. In this article, we discuss how teachers can use the…

While known to influence visual lexical processing, the semantic information we associate with words has recently been found to influence auditory lexical processing as well. The present work explored the influence of "semantic richness" in auditory lexical decision. Study 1 recreated an experiment investigating semantic richness effects…

Students who have remained classified as English Learners (ELs) for more than six years are often labeled "Long-term English Learners" (LTELs). The present study examined the English Language Development (ELD) test scores and demographic information in a group of 560 students identified as LTELs. Despite assumptions that these students…

Humans are born storytellers as they use oral narratives as a vehicle to share their experiences. This study aimed to study how female Egyptian speakers formulate their personal experiences in oral narratives in the English Language. A need of this study was felt because not much is known how Arab EFL speakers build their oral narratives when its…

In the assessment of second language oral communication, the video-call speaking test has received increasing attention as a test method with higher practicality than its in-person counterpart, but still with broad coverage of the test construct. Previous studies into video-call assessment have focussed on the individual (as opposed to paired or…

Language reflects how people think and behave in their culture. To have successful conversations, both language use and cultural awareness should be taken into consideration. Undeniably, Japanese grammar is different from Thai making it even harder for Thai learners to have fluent and appropriate conversations in the Japanese language. In the…

Dialogic reading is a shared reading intervention which has been shown to increase children's oral language skills. Although dialogic reading has been heavily researched and replicated with a variety of populations, this study uniquely focused on outcomes when parents of children with a developmental delay from low socioeconomic status homes were…

In this paper, Indigenous and local understandings of the role of storytelling for children (nthanu) are contrasted with the didactic understandings of children's stories that permeate the formal education frameworks of Malawi; frameworks which are deeply entangled in a colonial and (post)colonial history. For Chitonga speakers, the majority of…

This study identifies language specific errors made with transcoding tasks to inform possible future pedagogic decisions regarding the language used when teaching early number. We compared children aged 5-7 years from Kuwait and England. The spoken Arabic language of Kuwait gave the opportunity to compare not only languages where the tens and…

This article responds to calls for greater inclusivity in second language acquisition research and, more specifically, to calls to explore further the impact of first language literacy on second language oracy (e.g., Tarone et al., 2009). We conducted a partial replication of Foster and Skehan's (1996) influential study of task complexity,…

School-based social practices of oral feedback present challenges for all k-12 students. Ignoring these challenges during reading assessment contributes to a deficit view of emergent bilingual students, whose struggles to participate in formative feedback on reading performance may result from general unfamiliarity with school-based practices,…