Both off-line and on-line comprehension studies suggest not only toddlers and preschoolers, but also older school-age children have trouble interpreting contrast-marking pitch prominence. To test whether children achieve adult-like proficiency in processing contrast-marking prosody during school years, an eye-tracking experiment examined the…

Purpose: Results of recent pilot studies suggest that the interpretation of pronouns in individuals with Down syndrome (DS) may follow a pattern unattested in typical development, indicating the presence of a selective deficit targeting the comprehension of reflexive pronouns. These findings come at a time when there is a heated debate surrounding…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the intelligibility and attitude towards four English varieties to Korean-speaking learners (KSLs) of English, who have been exposed mainly to General American (or Korean-accented English) in their English language learning classrooms throughout the primary and secondary schools. A total of 105 Korean…

Previous studies have shown that multilingual speakers are influenced by their native (L1) and non-native (L2) grammars when learning a new language. But, so far, these studies have mostly used untimed metalinguistic tasks. Here we examine whether multilinguals' prior grammars also affect their sensitivity to morphosyntactic constraints during…

This study aims to investigate patterns of variation in the interplay of L2 language ability and general reading comprehension skills in L2 reading, by comparing item-level effects of test-takers' results on L1 and L2 reading comprehension tests. The material comes from more than 500,000 people tested on L1 (Swedish) and L2 (English) in the…

This study reports on the instruction provided in district-designed intensive summer reading programs. The Tier 3 intervention was provided to 374 students from 24 school districts who were not meeting the end of third-grade reading benchmarks; students were exiting third grade and entering fourth grade. Observations of the 40 classes were…

This study, using a mixed methods design, examined the use of a photograph-based model to improve students' language and writing skills. Classes were assigned to receive the photograph-based intervention (experimental) or to receive the regular language-based curriculum (control). Both second and fifth grade students in the experimental group…

Around the world, English language educators are increasingly turning to localized and culturally-oriented learning materials to adapt to the needs of their learners. Along with this trend, a small but growing number of studies support the notion that culturally familiar contexts in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learning have positive…

At start-up of a book distribution programme (Dolly Parton's Imagination Library) in a southeastern United States community, we examined baseline relationships between at-home shared book reading (SBR) and children's language/literacy abilities and skills at kindergarten entry. One hundred fifty-two parent/child dyads participated; children (53%…

The PM Benchmark Reading Assessment Resource (PM Benchmarks) provides information about primary students' level of achievement in reading accurately, fluently, and in understanding unseen texts. As part of the assessment, students have to orally retell what they have read and orally answer comprehension questions. This oral use of language…

Relationships between early literacy measures (i.e., curriculum-based measurement) and advanced literacy measures (i.e., reading comprehension) were examined in young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Participants in this study were 167 children between the ages of 4 and 7 years (M = 5 years 8 months), who were assessed at 2 time…

Background: Mind wandering (MW) has commonly been linked to bad scholastic performance; however, such association has rarely been investigated in the classroom. Moreover, in examining such association, motivational variables have been largely ignored. Aim: We aimed at examining the associations between the dispositional tendency to engage in MW…

Teachers can potentially address reading comprehension deficits in a content area, such as science, by using the students in their classrooms as resources. We examined the effects of a class-wide partner reading intervention with science reading materials on a measure of content comprehension skills. A total of 65 fourth-grade students and 61…

Academic language, which is characterized by the words and structure of the language of schooling, is an important teachable component of academic achievement. When compared to other strong predictors of academic achievement (e.g., decoding, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension), academic language is not as well understood or explicitly taught in…

This contribution was an attempt to study the impact of critical discourse-based instruction on Iranian English major language learners' in-depth reading. To this target, Fairclough's three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis [CDA], with an emphasis on the 10-question model was used. To this end, all undergraduate foreign language…