With the decline in Australian school children's mathematics skills, the spotlight is shining on the quality of early childhood mathematics teaching and learning in the preschool years. Spatial thinking--which includes spatial orientation and spatial visualization--contributes to early mathematical thinking and children have the capacity to…

Children's gesture production precedes and predicts language development, but the pathways linking these domains are unclear. It is possible that gesture production assists in children's developing word comprehension, which in turn supports expressive vocabulary acquisition. The present study examines this mediation pathway in a population with…

In her influential paper on stance, alignment, and affiliation in conversational storytelling, Tanya Stivers argued that two basic conversational means of receiving a story, nods and vocal continuers, differ in their function: whereas vocal continuers display "alignment" with the telling activity, nods, during the mid-telling, convey…

This study examined facial expressions produced during a British Sign Language (BSL) narrative task (Herman et al., International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders 49(3):343-353, 2014) by typically developing deaf children and deaf children with autism spectrum disorder. The children produced BSL versions of a video story in which…

This study aimed to explore the relationship between Turkish English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' self-efficacy level and their opinion regarding their use of compensatory strategies (CSs). The study further searched into the most and the least frequently used CSs by Turkish EFL learners. The participants of the study were fifty…

People who receive supportive communication when they are distressed benefit from a series of advantageous outcomes. We designed the following activity based on the popular board game Apples to Apples to provide students with an experiential understanding of different types of social support--(1) emotional, (2) esteem, (3) network, (4)…

This study explores teachers' perceptions and practices about the translanguaging approach in CLIL elementary and secondary school contexts in Taiwan. It first investigates 422 in-service teachers' perspectives toward teachers' and students' use of (1) a native language; (2) non-verbal behaviors; and (3) other meaning-making signs in the language…

This study examined image-text relations in English-as-a-foreign-language textbooks focusing on moving-image animations that accompany verbal dialogues. It also explores how animations support verbal dialogues in the textbooks. Data sources include three major versions of junior high school textbooks locally-produced in Taiwan, each consisting of…

Informed by critical data literacy efforts to promote social justice, this paper uses qualitative methods and data collected during two years of workplace ethnography to characterize the notion of critical novice data work. Specifically, we analyze everyday language used by novice data workers at DataWorks, an organization that trains and employs…

This paper presents the findings from a case study which explores how students engage with learning materials mediated through 360-degree panoramic videos. The case study extends findings from a project which developed an online platform for viewing and annotating 360-degree videos, and for providing data analytics (heatmaps, viewpoint tracking…

Virtual reality (VR) technology is making its mark across market sectors (e.g., gaming, healthcare, tourism). This paper examines the use of VR in education, specifically in business classes, to better understand how this technology can help students improve their communication skills associated in delivering effective presentations and…

This study, generated from considerations of embodied cognition, observational learning, and cognitive load theory, investigated the effect of mimicking gestures on learning to play piano tasks. Fifty university students from an Australian University, with two different levels of piano-playing experience, were randomly assigned to one of the two…

Many sexual assault education/prevention initiatives focus on sexual consent. However, little is known about how key recipients of such endeavors (i.e. college men) understand sexual consent. Using in-depth interviews, this study examined how 40 racially/ethnically diverse heterosexual college men conceptualized sexual consent. Using inductive…

Online learning engagement detection is a fundamental problem in educational information technology. Efficient detection of students' learning situations can provide information to teachers to help them identify students having trouble in real time. To improve the accuracy of learning engagement detection, we have collected two aspects of…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are characterized by deficits in social communication, partly attributed to the inability to pick up cues from social partners using joint attention (JA) skill. These deficits have cascading adverse effects on language acquisition and the development of cognitive skills. Therapist-mediated JA…