Purpose: To investigate the usefulness of 3 tasks known to be effective diagnostic clinical markers of specific language impairment (SLI) in children: (a) nonword repetition, (b) sentence repetition, and (c) grammaticality judgments of finiteness marking. Method: Two groups of young adults, 13 with SLI and 18 with typical language, completed 3…

A four-location belief task was designed to examine children's understanding of another's uncertain belief after passing a false belief (FB) task. In Experiment 1, after passing the FB task, participants were asked what a puppet would do after he failed to find his toy at the falsely believed location. Most 4-year-olds and half of 6-year-olds…

Does the capacity of visual short-term memory (VSTM) depend on the complexity of the objects represented in memory? Although some previous findings indicated lower capacity for more complex stimuli, other results suggest that complexity effects arise during retrieval (due to errors in the comparison process with what is in memory) that is not…

Three experiments investigated the effect of an adult's social cues on 2- and 3-year-old children's ability to use a sign or symbol to locate a hidden object. Results showed that an adult's positive, engaging facial expression facilitated children's ability to identify the correct referent, particularly for 3-year-olds. A neutral facial expression…

Many cognitive theories have described behavior as the summation of independent contributions from separate components. Contrasting views have emphasized the importance of multiplicative interactions and emergent structure. We describe a statistical approach to distinguishing additive and multiplicative processes and apply it to the dynamics of…

The purpose of the study reported in this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of an implementation of teaching rounds as a practice-based approach to pre-service teacher education in mathematics. The teaching rounds implemented in the study utilised the NSW Quality Teaching model pedagogical framework as a tool for learning about and reflecting…

To understand how dominant messages about race and effective pedagogy impact teacher beliefs and practice, this study employs critical race theory (CRT) in a case study analysis of Rebecca Rosenberg, a mid-career entrant into the teaching profession who was terminated from her first job before the end of her district's probationary period. Despite…

This paper presents some of the overall frameworks and models for language learning that were used under Avalon (Access to Virtual and Action Learning live ONline), an EU co-funded project aimed at developing language-learning scenarios in virtual worlds. The introduction and background summarize some of the theories that constitute the starting…

It is generally believed that interlanguage pragmatics and motivation play important roles in learning. Motivation is important because it determines the extent of the learner's active involvement and attitude toward learning. The major purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of integrative and instrumental motivation on the…

Many studies have shed light on rater criteria for assessing the performance of language skills (e.g., Eckes, 2005). However, the interface between rater assessment and interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) has remained largely unnoticed. To address this interface, this study explored the ratings native (NES) and nonnative English speaking (NNES)…

This article describes a model used to explore cultural understanding in English as a foreign language reading in a developing country, namely Argentina. The model is designed to investigate, analyse and describe EFL readers' processes of cultural understanding in a specific context. Cultural understanding in reading is typically investigated…

Adaptive guidance is an instructional intervention that helps learners to make use of the control inherent in technology-based instruction. The present research investigated the interactive effects of guidance design (i.e., framing of guidance information) and individual differences (i.e., pretraining motivation and ability) on learning basic and…

Middle school is a crucial transition period for students as they move from concrete to algebraic ways of thinking. This article describes a sequence of instruction geared toward helping prospective middle school instructors teach the topic of percentages.

Seven-year-old triplets with autism displayed off-task behavior that threatened their continued placement in a general education first-grade classroom. A descriptive Functional Behavioral Assessment (FBA) was conducted for each student. Data from structured interviews and direct observations were used to identify the functions of their off-task…

This study investigated the ways in which two groups of four adult learners of English as a second language (ESL) responded to unfamiliar words they encountered in four communication tasks and the effect that different levels of engagement with these words (including negotiation of form and meaning) had on subsequent recall of word meaning. Of the…