The study upon which this article is based investigates teachers' literacy development methods used in nursery and reception classrooms of a British international school, and focuses specifically on children having English as an additional language (EAL). Findings from teaching observations and from interviews with teachers present the techniques…

Over the past decades, studies of EFL/ESL vocabulary acquisition have identified the significance of collocations in language learning. Due to the fact that collocations have been regarded as one of the major concerns of both EFL teachers and learners for many years, the present study attempts to shed light on the impact of corpus-based…

As part of a growing body of conversation analytic research on epistemics in social interaction, this study explores various uses of the Japanese sentence-final particle "kke", which conveys the speaker's claim that she or he has some degree of uncertainty in recalling something from the past. The study aims to demonstrate how "mental" concepts…

Connectionist theories of language propose that written language deficits arise as a result of damage to semantic and phonological systems that also support spoken language production and comprehension, a view referred to as the "primary systems" hypothesis. The objective of the current study was to evaluate the primary systems account in a mixed…

In two experiments we investigated the relationship between the working memory skills of sign language interpreters and the quality of their interpretations. In Experiment 1, we found that scores on 3-back tasks with signs and words were not related to the quality of interpreted narratives. In Experiment 2, we found that memory span scores for…

This study suggests that Intermediate High and Advanced speakers produce aspectually valid constructions in Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPIs) in large part because they are doing more than assigning aspect to lexical categories (Lexical aspect hypothesis), but because they are assigning lexicalized meaning to discrete verbs, for example…

Student learning and program effectiveness is often assessed using rubrics. While much time and effort may go into their creation, it is equally important to assess how effective and efficient the rubrics actually are in terms of measuring competencies over a number of criteria. This study demonstrates the use of common factor analysis to identify…

Viva voce is the Latin expression traditionally used to refer to doctoral oral examinations. Viva voce, or simply viva, examinations are a standard requirement for doctoral candidacy and degree completion in many counselor education programs. Despite the prevalent use of vivas as an assessment and learning tool, the counselor education literature…

In this article, we report the planning and implementation of an oral assessment component in a first-year pure mathematics module of a degree course in mathematics. Our aim was to examine potential barriers to using oral assessments, explore the advantages and disadvantages compared to existing common assessment methods and document the outcomes…

Many multisyllabic words contain shorter words that are not semantic units, like the CAP in HANDICAP and the DURA ("hard") in VERDURA ("vegetable"). The spaces between printed words identify word boundaries, but spurious identification of these embedded words is a potentially greater challenge for spoken language comprehension, a challenge that is…

This paper examines the processes through which learners interact with a corpus system and microgenetic development emerges from the interaction. The corpus system described in this paper is capable of retrieving highly relevant textual examples tailored to individual needs. Data were collected from an undergraduate ESL composition course in North…

Current accounts of spoken language assume the existence of a lexicon where wordforms are stored and interact during spoken language perception, understanding and production. Despite the theoretical importance of the wordform lexicon, the exact localization and function of the lexicon in the broader context of language use is not well understood.…

In two eye-tracking experiments in Italian, we investigated how acoustic information and stored knowledge about lexical stress are used during the recognition of tri-syllabic spoken words. Experiment 1 showed that Italians use acoustic cues to a word's stress pattern rapidly in word recognition, but only for words with antepenultimate stress.…

The ihear[R] Internet Therapy Program (ihear) provides effective, individualized, and interactive therapy that is tailored to each child's specific needs through a secure, high-quality Internet connection. The program brings listening and spoken language services directly to schools and families. The foundation for ihear is based on the St. Joseph…

Yuki and the other Northern Yukian languages, Huchnom and Coast Yuki, were spoken until recently in Mendocino County in Northern California. This dissertation is a grammar of Yuki based primarily on spoken narratives recorded in the first decade of the twentieth century, so it provides a description of the Yuki language as it was spoken at that…