Grounded in a strong evidence base, this indispensable text and practitioner guide has given thousands of teachers tools to support the literacy growth of beginning and struggling readers in grades K-2. The interactive strategies approach (ISA) is organized around core instructional goals related to enhancing word learning and comprehension of…

This article addresses key issues and considerations for teachers wanting to incorporate spoken grammar activities into their own teaching and also focuses on six common features of spoken grammar, with practical activities and suggestions for teaching them in the language classroom. The hope is that this discussion of spoken grammar and its place…

In Kenya, the only official document that deals with the use of mother tongue (MT) in Schools is the 1967 Gachathi report. The report has clear-cut guidance and policy regarding MT use by the hearing children. However, for deaf children, no such policy exists; therefore, the use of the deaf child's MT (Kenyan Sign Language (KSL)) in schools for…

The Report of the National Reading Panel (NICHD, 2000) identified five key elements that were critical to the development of reading, and these have been widely accepted by educational jurisdictions as providing definitive guidelines for early reading instruction. This paper presents a case for the inclusion of oral language and early literacy…

This paper analyzes the spoken corpus of thirty Iranian learners of French at four levels (A1, A2, B1 and B2). The data were collected in a pseudo-longitudinal manner in semi-directed interviews with half closed and open questions to analyze the learners' syntactic errors (omission, addition, substitution and displacement). The most frequent…

The processing difficulty of nested grammatical structure has been explained by different psycholinguistic theories. Here I provide corpus and behavioral evidence in favor of usage-based models, focusing on the case of object relative clauses in Spanish as a first language. A corpus analysis of spoken Spanish reveals that, as in English, the…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship among oral language, decoding, and reading comprehension for children with autism. Participants included 13 English-speaking children with a diagnosis of high-functioning autism (IQ > 70) who were included in a typical classroom, and who had parents who spoke English. Parts of the…

Oral narrative is a critical skill for school achievement, for personal relationships and for social participation. However, it is downgraded in current and proposed National Curriculum frameworks, which fail to recognise its significance in development. Schools have flexibility to address the issue, which is of particular importance to pupils…

Purpose: This study examined dimensions of written composition by using multiple evaluative approaches such as an adapted 6 + 1 trait scoring, syntactic complexity measures, and productivity measures. It further examined unique relations of oral language and literacy skills to the identified dimensions of written composition. Method: A large…

This study analyses the expression of locative and existential predicates elicited through an oral production task in the speech of two groups of learners of Spanish as a second language (L2) (first language English, n = 18; first language Moroccan Arabic, n = 14), and a native control group (n = 18). A total of 25,000 words were analysed, with…

In an effort to understand cognitive foundations of oral language comprehension (i.e., listening comprehension), we examined how inhibitory control, theory of mind, and comprehension monitoring are uniquely related to listening comprehension over and above vocabulary and age. A total of 156 children in kindergarten and first grade from…

SpeakApps 2 is a project with support of the Lifelong Learning Programme, Accompanying Measures. It follows up on the work and results reached during the KA2 project "SpeakApps: Oral production and interaction in a foreign language through ICT tools". The overarching aim of SpeakApps 2 is to further enhance Europeans' language learning…

In the present study, we examined the influence of kindergarten component skills on writing outcomes, both concurrently and longitudinally to first grade. Using data from 265 students, we investigated a model of writing development including attention regulation along with students' reading, spelling, handwriting fluency, and oral language…

The new writing standards outlined in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are ambitious. Meeting these new demands will be challenging for all students, but even more so for English Learners (ELs) who are simultaneously developing language proficiency while learning to write in new genres. Teacher feedback is widely accepted to be a potentially…

The concept of focus on form has been influential in second language (L2) acquisition and pedagogy. One example of the implementation of focus on form is a post-task activity (e.g., anticipation of a public performance) that can selectively orient learners toward increased levels of accuracy. The present research proposes a new operationalization…