The TILA project originated from the need to explore whether and how telecollaboration affects language learning processes for communication, intercultural understanding and motivation of youngsters learning foreign languages at secondary schools and to empower teachers to pioneer meaningful pedagogical innovation in the curriculum of foreign…

Sometimes parents just do not know where to begin once their child has been diagnosed as deaf or hearing impaired. This booklet will help answer some of the questions parents might have. A resource section has been included for parents and professionals on pages 43-44, for future reference. One of the most important things to remember is that,…

The present study investigated the developmental interrelationships between play, gesture use and spoken language development in children aged 18-31 months. The children completed two tasks: (i) a structured measure of pretend (or "symbolic") play and (ii) a measure of vocabulary knowledge in which children have been shown to gesture.…

This article reports on the experiences and opportunities that two University Pedagogy courses offered to University of Helsinki Language Centre personnel in 2011-2012. The Language Centre and Language Services working community shares an understanding that everyone is working towards the same goal: to support university students' language…

This article presents a pedagogical practice for noticing and negotiating error in a multilingual classroom. Two examples from a classroom are compared to demonstrate the importance of "noticing" in the context of translingual pedagogy. The author's first example offers an attempt to negotiate an error with a multilingual writer without…

While there has been extensive research exploring the quality of caregiver-child interactions in programmes for preschool children, comparatively less international research has explored the nature of caregiver-child interactions in centre-based infant-care programmes. Nine caregivers in six Singapore infant-care settings were observed and…

While the population of bilinguals and English learners continues to rise in our schools, teachers often feel frustrated with their lack of knowledge about best practices to support their multilingual students' language, socio-emotional and cognitive development. Teachers' frustration is compounded by the push for assessments in the…

Purpose: In this study, the authors explored whether French-learning infants use nonadjacent phonotactic regularities in their native language, which they learn between the ages of 7 and 10 months, to segment words from fluent speech. Method: Two groups of 20 French-learning infants were tested using the head-turn preference procedure at 10 and 13…

Word learning is a lifelong activity constrained by cognitive biases that people possess at particular points in development. Age of acquisition (AoA) is a psycholinguistic variable that may prove useful toward gauging the relative weighting of different phonological, semantic, and morphological factors at different phases of language acquisition…

While Hulk and Muller (2000) predict that the direction of cross-linguistic syntactic influence is unidirectional when the construction involves syntax-pragmatics interface and surface overlap between two languages, they explicitly rule out language dominance as a factor involved. This study questions their latter claim and argues that the syntax…

Many U.S. classrooms today have at least some children with limited abilities to understand and express themselves in English. Two critical factors spell success or failure for teachers who have dual language learners (DLLs) in their classrooms: the teacher's understanding of and respect for the initial difficulties in learning a second language…

The interaction approach to second language acquisition (SLA) suggests that changes that occur during conversation facilitate second language development by providing learners with opportunities to receive modified comprehensible input and interactional feedback, to produce output, and to notice gaps between their interlanguage and the target…

The purpose of this study was to explore the tenacities, practices, and discourse of family-based literacy practices and their connection in African American families. It scrutinized the influence of the practices of African American families on the multiple contexts of literacy practices in their passageway across the school-community periphery.…

This dissertation studies how people describe emotions with language and how computers can simulate this descriptive behavior. Although many non-human animals can express their current emotions as social signals, only humans can communicate about emotions symbolically. This symbolic communication of emotion allows us to talk about emotions that we…

This study utilized a paired priming paradigm to examine the influence of input features on case assignment in typically developing English-speaking children. The Input Ambiguity Hypothesis (Pelham, 2011) was experimentally tested to help explain why children produce subject pronoun case errors. Analyses of third singular "-s" marking on…