The goal of this study was to describe how underlying vocabulary knowledge manifests into vocabulary usage, and in turn, how usage predicts writing quality among adult basic education (ABE) learners. ABE learners were administered tasks that measured vocabulary knowledge, in the forms of both vocabulary breadth and depth. Participants were also…

Extending previous findings on adult L2 learners' integration of verbal and constructional information, this study investigated how child learners of English as a foreign language produce verbs in target constructions and whether (a) receptive skills and (b) the specific production modality (spoken versus written) modulate the integration process.…

This paper focuses on a group of mothers of immigrant origin as they engage in explorations and conversations about mathematics. We examine how bringing in tasks that draw on their children's school mathematics, and on the participants' knowledge and experiences, can inform us about their understanding of mathematics and provide opportunities to…

Background: Parenting strategies such as communicating clear expectations, providing calm directions, and teaching specific skills can strengthen young children's social-emotional development. Parenting programs for children with disruptive behavior often emphasize gaining compliance via effective directives, and less on how to facilitate child…

Listening comprehension is a real-time process, yet very little is known about the variables affecting real-time second language (L2) listening. The present study aimed at investigating the effects of syntactic complexity and word frequency on L2 listening. Furthermore, the role of the listener's working memory capacity in listening comprehension…

This research compared the contributions of lexical inferencing, decoding, and listening comprehension to reading comprehension in Chinese-speaking learners of English as a second language (ESL) enrolled in university bridging programs in the U.S. and Chinese-speaking university learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in mainland China.…

The role played by working memory (WM), that is, the capacity to temporarily maintain and cognitively process information, has been extensively studied in second language (L2) research. In a general sense, WM has been shown to be related to various aspects of L2 learning and use; however, little information is available regarding its relationship…

Despite the known roles of working memory and background knowledge in the process of reading comprehension, few attempts have been made to elucidate the interaction between these two individual difference factors in second language (L2) reading comprehension. The current study investigated whether and how working memory and background knowledge…

Research Findings: The present study examined (a) whether children's negative emotionality traits (anger proneness and unsoothability) interactively predict mothers' authoritarian parenting (AP) and (b) whether children's negative emotionality moderates the associations between AP and children's performance on a spatial cognitive task. Eighty…

Adaptive learning technologies hold great promise for improving the reading skills of adults with low literacy, but adults with low literacy skills typically have low computer literacy skills. In order to determine whether adults with low literacy skills would be able to use an intelligent tutoring system for reading comprehension, we adapted a 44…

Corrective feedback (CF) is an important part of effective instruction, and a rich body of research has investigated how best to implement various CF strategies and approaches. Researchers have increasingly become aware of individual differences that have an impact on the effect and effectiveness of CF. One area of individual difference that has…

The extent to which learners benefit from instruction may be largely dependent on their individual abilities. However, there is relatively little work on the interaction between instructional effectiveness in second language learning and learner individual factors. In this study, we investigated the relationship between instruction, individual…

The present mixed-methods study examined the role of learner appraisals of speech tasks in second language (L2) French fluency. Forty adult learners in a Canadian immersion program participated in the study that compared four sources of data: (1) objectively measured utterance fluency in participants' performances of three narrative tasks…

This study investigated whether task complexity may affect L2 speaking performance as predicted by the Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson, 2011), and whether the effect of task complexity may interact with individual differences in working memory capacity. A total of twenty Korean advanced-level EFL learners performed two separate picture description…

Objective: Research on children's risk of injury reveals that parent and child factors are often interrelated. This study examined relations between children's risk taking, parent appraisal of this risk taking, and children's rate of injury in youth 8 and 9 years old. Methods: Responses to questionnaires and laboratory tasks were used to examine…