A randomized controlled trial was conducted to evaluate effects of the Joint Attention Mediated Learning (JAML) intervention. Toddlers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) aged 16-30 months (n = 144) were randomized to intervention and community control conditions. Parents, who participated in 32 weekly home-based sessions, followed a mediated…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to address a practical question and problem: what can explain the small number of underrepresented racial and ethnic practitioners in the public relations industry? By placing race at the center of this study via critical race theory, the authors sought to answer the previously mentioned practical question.…

Rohingya people being sheltered in East Aceh, Indonesia, are taught English to prepare them for their future resettlement in Western countries; these countries are as determined by the United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The Rohingya are taught English by local Acehnese mentors at UNHCR refugee camps. This research was designed…

Using a novel emotional perspective-taking task, this study investigated 4-year-olds' (n = 97) use of a speaker's emotional prosody to make inferences about the speaker's emotional state and, correspondingly, their communicative intent. Eye gaze measures indicated preschoolers used emotional perspective inferences to guide their real-time…

Children with social skills deficits in verbal and nonverbal communication can face a variety of social challenges in many aspects of their lives. Given the increasing social needs of many students in today's classrooms, there is a need for increased social skills instruction and support in public schools. Inclusion opportunities in public schools…

Drawing from the theory of planned behavior, we conducted a belief elicitation study to gain insights on what considerations guide Chinese English-as-foreign-language students' decision to participate in English during class. We used four semistructured focus groups (in Chinese) to explore salient beliefs from a total of 34 Chinese university…

This study investigates how pre-service English teachers interrupt extended wait-time in English as a foreign language classroom contexts. Utilizing extended wait-time is an indicator of Classroom Interactional Competence, and thus it is an essential skill for efficient language teachers. In the literature, there are quite a few studies on how…

This two-year case study examined multi-modal, interdisciplinary approaches to engage both immigrant English Second Language (ESL) and English Language Learners (ELL) in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) learning and to build STEM identity and self-efficacy. Leveraging innate abilities, multiple intelligences, and self-identified…

The purpose of this study was to create and prototype a dual language assessment task that allows young English learners to use their entire cadre of linguistic resources (language and non-verbal resources) to obtain information about their emergent language abilities. We developed a dual language assessment task in which students described a…

Foreign language teaching highlights the cultivation of the learners' communicative competence, because the main purpose of learning a foreign language is to use the target language to communicate. However, many students in higher institutions in China cannot speak English fluently after having learned English for more than ten years, although…

The present case study investigated the probable effect of applying a humanoid robot as a teacher-assistant for learning and retention of English vocabulary among 10 Iranian foreign language learners with intellectual disabilities, more specifically Down syndrome. This method is a new trend in using technology to teach classes called Robot…

Previous research on reference tracking has revealed a tendency towards over-explicitness in second language (L2) learners. Only limited evidence exists that this trend extends to situations where the learner's first and second languages do not share a sensory-motor modality. Using a story-telling paradigm, this study examined how hearing novice…

In everyday social life, we predict others' actions in response to our own actions. Subsequently, on the basis of these predictions, we control our actions to attain desired social outcomes and/or adjust our actions to accommodate the anticipated actions of the others. Representation of the bidirectional association between our and others'…

Interaction between two people may be construed as a continuous process of perception and action within the dyad. A theoretical framework is proposed in this article that explains the concepts and processes which comprise the interaction process. The article explores the transactional nature of interaction, through analysis of narrative data from…

Early language learning for children is increasingly common, and the majority of parents and the public do not see it as superfluous or overburdening children. Moreover, teaching a foreign language (FL) to very young children has been an increasingly dominant trend in most globalized societies. While there is abundant literature that supports…