Based on a parliamentary vote with broad support, the Ministry of Justice of the Netherlands in December 2003 commissioned the development of an examination system to test the Dutch oral language skills of foreigners who want to immigrate permanently to the Netherlands for economic or family reasons. This assessment would take place in the country…

In recent decades, with an increasing application of computer technology to the delivery of oral language proficiency assessment, there have been renewed debates over the appropriateness of two different testing modes, namely, (a) face-to-face, or direct, testing, and (b) person-to-machine, or semi-direct, testing. Previous research conducted in…

This study investigates the variation in oral proficiency demonstrated by 14 Air Traffic Controllers across two types of testing tasks: work-related radio telephony-based tasks and non-specific English tasks on aviation topics. Their performance was compared statistically in terms of level ratings on the International Civil Aviation Organization…

The notion that young children form and test hypotheses about early print is well established in relation to children from different cultures who use different languages. This study demonstrates that this also obtains for young deaf children still in the early stages of developing spoken language. Data collected from the homes of 13 deaf children…

The process of disciplinary socialisation has been linked to a gradual mastery of a discipline's genres. This article takes a view of genre, as indexing a wide range of often implicit understandings about knowledge creation and use within a discipline, and as fully rhetorical. Within such a framework, novice and near-expert examples of one…

This study investigates the relationship between oral proficiency and reading proficiency in English-learning children (L2 students) and native English-speaking children (NE students). A set of oral activities measuring students' academic oral skills in science classes was developed and administered to 61 fourth graders. Both the meaning-related…

Disadvantaged children--those in poverty, minorities, or whose first language is not English--often come to kindergarten several years behind their more advantaged peers, especially in the areas of literacy and oral language development. A logical place to begin making a difference in children's literate lives is in the years before kindergarten.…

In education, the term learning disability is used to describe specific kinds of problems that an individual has with understanding or using spoken or written language. A student with a specific learning disability may have difficulty listening, thinking, speaking, reading, writing, spelling, or doing math problems. You may have heard of dyslexia.…

In a recall-based spoken production experiment, native English-speaking participants' variable use of the complementiser "that" to introduce the sentential complement in sentences like "Henry knew (that) Lucy/Louise washed the dishes" was found to be related to whether "that" inclusion/omission resulted in an alternating sequence of stressed and…

Speaking a word can be started faster when all the words in a given block share the initial portion (e.g., syllable) than when they do not (known as the form preparation effect). Two experiments employed the task to examine the role of morphemes in Chinese word production. In Experiment 1, the disyllabic target words were monomorphemic or…

A formative design experiment methodology was employed to investigate the acquisition of early reading skills for high school English language learners (ELLs) beginning to read English. A fundamental challenge facing high school ELLs entering schools in the United States for the first time is learning how to read. While there is considerable…

Interest in students who exhibit characteristics with difficulties in learning can be traced as far back as 1800. In order to better understand the complexities and causes of learning disabilities, many researchers (Bannatyne, 1968, 1974; Rugal, 1974) have investigated ways to better identify learners who struggle with academics. A strong argument…

Linguistic prominence is defined as words or syllables perceived auditorily as standing out from their environment. It is explored through changes in pitch, duration and loudness. In this study, phonetic realization and perception of prominence among lexical tones in Mandarin Chinese was investigated in two experiments. Experiment 1 explored…

The phonetic context in which word-medial flaps occur (in contrast to [t[superscript h]]) in American English is explored. The analysis focuses on stress placement, following phone, and syllabification. In Experiment 1, subjects provided their preference for [t[superscript h]] or [flapped t] in bisyllabic nonce words. Consistent with previous…

The aim of this study was to examine processing interactions between segmental (consonant, vowel) and suprasegmental (tone) dimensions of Mandarin Chinese. Using a speeded classification paradigm, processing interactions were examined between each pair of dimensions. Listeners were asked to attend to one dimension while ignoring the variation…