Mauritius is a multilingual island, where there is a linguistic and literacy paradox. While Mauritian Creole dominates as the spoken language of the population, English and French are the main print languages, as well as the main languages of literacy and education. In such a complex situation, preschool is an interesting terrain in which to…

Is the doctoral "viva voce" a reasonable method of examination? This exploratory paper proposes that the doctoral "viva voce" (oral examination) is a slightly different hurdle for doctoral candidates for whom English is an additional language (EAL, also termed ESL) than for those whose first language is English. It investigates…

Performance on integrated tasks requires candidates to engage skills and strategies beyond language proficiency alone, in ways that can be difficult to define and measure for testing purposes. While it has been widely recognized that stimulus materials impact test performance, our understanding of the way in which test takers make use of these…

Data from 492 Italian infants (8-18 months) were collected with the parental questionnaire MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventories to describe early actions and gestures (A-G) "vocabulary" and its relation with spoken vocabulary in both comprehension and production. A-G were more strongly correlated with word comprehension…

The purpose of this study is to analyze the progress of 14 Spanish-speaking learners of English during a period abroad from a longitudinal perspective. Oral and written data were collected three times during an academic year at a British university. These samples were analyzed in terms of fluency, syntactic complexity, lexical richness, and…

This longitudinal study investigated temporal auditory processing (frequency modulation and between-channel gap detection) and speech perception (speech-in-noise and categorical perception) in three groups of 6 years 3 months to 6 years 8 months-old children attending grade 1: (1) children with specific language impairment (SLI) and literacy delay…

This study examined the relationship between nonmainstream American English (NMAE) dialect use and various emergent literacy skills among typically developing children in prekindergarten. Correlation and regression analyses were used to examine the relationship between children's production of NMAE forms (i.e., dialect variation [DVAR]) and their…

This paper discusses the use of multidimensional analysis (MA) of learner language to promote the awareness of linguistic concepts such as register and variation. Our research explores the introduction of learner register awareness by using MA of learner language in the field of university Foreign Language Teaching (FLT). In this context, a group…

The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that word reading accuracy, not oral language, is associated with spelling performance in school-age children. We compared fourth grade spelling accuracy in children with specific language impairment (SLI), dyslexia or both (SLI/dyslexia) to their typically developing grade-matched peers.…

This article explores uninvestigated issues in Cantonese and "Hoisan-wa" language maintenance from an ethnic Chinese diaspora point of view. Data come from a larger study looking at Frog Story narratives from 140 Cantonese-English bilingual children in California. Fourteen of these children were found to display uniquely…

In October, 2011, Age of Learning, Inc., creator of ABCmouse.com "Early Learning Academy" conducted a nationwide survey of 500 kindergarten teachers on the subject of children's preparedness for kindergarten. The survey revealed that two-thirds of America's kindergarten teachers believe most young children are academically unprepared for school…

Writers typically produce their writing in bursts. In this article, the authors examine written language bursts in a sample of 33 children aged 11 years with specific language impairment. Comparisons of the children with specific language impairment with an age-matched group of typically developing children (n = 33) and a group of younger,…

Purpose: Students with language-learning disabilities (LLD) demonstrate difficulties with written language, especially in the areas of productivity, complexity, and grammar. It is not clear how these deficits affect their performance on high-stakes tests, such as those required by the No Child Left Behind Act (U.S. Department of Education, 2002).…

This paper reports findings from a study on the discourse functions of basic "wh"-clefts such as "what our brains do is complicated information processing" in 160 lectures drawn from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. Like much linguistic research on this academic genre, the investigation is motivated by the…

The Shepherd Centre is a nonprofit early intervention program in New South Wales, Australia, providing listening and spoken language services through an interdisciplinary team approach to children with hearing loss and their families. The program has been providing distance services to families in rural and remote areas of Australia and in other…