As universities in English-speaking countries recruit and enroll international students, a variety of forms of support are typically offered on and off campus to help students make a successful transition. The most common challenges for nonnative English-speaking international students are linguistic and cultural. In spite of meeting English…

It has been well established in the literature that the acquisition of literacy presents a significant challenge for most students who are deaf or hard of hearing (Allen, 1986; Babbini & Quigley, 1970; Holt, 1993; Lane & Baker, 1974; Marschark, Lang, & Albertini, 2002; Moog & Geers, 1985; Traxler, 2000; Trybus & Karchmer, 1977). Vocabulary, which…

We investigated Early Head Start home visitors' use of evidence-based practices and the efficacy of a web-based system to support these practices. Home visitors learned to use 3 evidence-based practices: (a) frequent assessment of children's early communication for screening and progress monitoring, (b) 2 home-based language-promoting…

Early childhood and special educators are under growing demands to develop children's language and literacy skills through evidence-based practices. One promising research-based strategy for vocabulary and language development is dialogic reading (DR), which is an interactive picture book reading technique developed in the late 1980's by…

This article begins by revisiting an old dispute between the children's writer Chukovsky and the child psychologist Vygotsky on whether and how child literature should mediate development. It then considers child language language lessons in South Korea for clues about how such mediation might happen, and finds the development of rote language,…

The Workshop on the Role of Language in School Learning: Implications for Closing the Achievement Gap was held to explore three questions: What is known about the conditions that affect language development? What are the effects of early language development on school achievement? What instructional approaches help students meet school demands for…

In this qualitative case study, I examined classroom interaction in an adolescent English as a second language classroom to explore the nature of effective teaching practices with emphasis on their influence on English Language Learners' language and identity development. Developmental analyses of prolonged class observations, semi-structured…

Background: Recent government initiatives in Hong Kong have focused on raising the participation of students from South Asian backgrounds in mainstream schools, to encourage their further integration into Hong Kong's educational system and society. These students' learning in mainstream schools takes place within the context of the central…

This study claims that Arab ESL students writing in English transfer L1 rhetorical modes of text organization into their English compositions. Fifty academic research papers were analysed in terms of the transition words and cohesive devices used, on the assumption that differences at the level of these language forms reflect differences at the…

In a bilingual context, the mother tongue plays a key role in a child's social and personal development, in education and in second-language learning. There is a complex relationship between these three areas. Support for children receiving education through a second language is often in the form of additional learning opportunities in the second…

Whether words are or are not activated within the lexicon of the nonused language is an important question for accounts of bilingual word production. Prior studies have not led to conclusive results, either because alternative accounts could be proposed for their findings or because activation could have been artificially induced by the…

For bilinguals born in an English-speaking country or who arrive at a young age, English (L2) often becomes their dominant language by adulthood. This study examines whether such adult bilinguals show equivalent performance to monolingual English native speakers on three English auditory processing tasks: phonemic awareness, spelling-to-dictation…

Teachers can integrate discussion and writing about photographs into the early childhood curriculum to build speaking, reading, and writing skills in any language. Although little available research focuses on photography and early childhood education as related specifically to English Language Learners, several current teacher resources do focus…

This study utilized a large sample of two-parent families from low-income rural communities to examine the contributions of father education and vocabulary, during picture book interactions with their infants at 6 months of age, to children's subsequent communication development at 15 months and expressive language development at 36 months. After…

This study addresses the development of the request strategies used in two service encounter scenarios by 31 nonnative speakers of Spanish spending 4 months living and studying in Valencia, Spain. The main method of data collection was an open role-play in which participants interacted with a Spanish native speaker. Results show that while there…