Comprehensive early childhood teacher preparation programs offer courses and curricula that are aligned with current research on best practices and related to the knowledge and skills that early childhood teacher candidates are expected to demonstrate on certification exams and teacher performance assessments. To support the alignment of early…

Engaging students in meaningful applications of their knowledge is a key aspect of both addressing the standards and providing greater access. Not only do the standards emphasize the importance of meaningful engagement in real-world tasks, but evidence shows that engagement is strongly related to student performance on assessment tasks, especially…

This paper outlines a framework to explain the early development of place-value understanding based on an analysis of data from 84 five- to seven-year-old children from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The children were assessed individually on number knowledge tasks (recalled facts, subitizing, counting, place-value understanding) and…

The study aims to investigate the effect of project-based learning on students' motivation and their self-efficacy. Project-based learning is an instructional technique which has been proven to be effective because it allows students to play an active role in their own learning process. By participating in a project-based learning model, students…

This study investigates the use of the Spanish subjunctive in bilingual children with and without specific language impairments (SLI). Using an elicitation task, we examine: (i) the potential of the subjunctive as a grammatical marker of SLI in Spanish-English bilingual children, (ii) the extent to which degree of bilingualism affects performance,…

This study investigated the effects of three fluency-enhancing activities on interpreting learners' performance. Four groups of students took part in the experiment. They were assigned to one of the four task conditions: pre-task planning, task repetition, formulae acquisition, and a control group. A temporal approach was adopted to measure…

We asked whether parental questionnaires on the heritage language proficiency of bilingual children might elucidate how proficient bilingual children are in their heritage language. We tested 20 UK-based Polish-English bilingual children between 4;5 and 5;9 years on Polish and English versions of the Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLTs). These…

Background: The detection of specific language impairment (SLI) in children growing up bilingually presents particular challenges for clinicians. Non-word repetition (NWR) and sentence repetition (SR) tasks have proven to be the most accurate diagnostic tools for monolingual populations, raising the question of the extent of their usefulness in…

The role of self-regulation in general learning has been investigated for some time now. Its significance and contribution to second language (L2) listening, however, has yet to be discussed extensively with empirical support. This article reports a case study involving four college EFL students in China over a six-month period of self-regulated…

This article focuses on research carried out in a private school in Bogotá with a group of English as a foreign language fourth-graders. The study aimed to analyze interaction in the English classroom through action research, based on tasks that promoted collaborative work and involvement of the students and their teacher. The instruments to…

This study investigated the effects of teaching English prepositions using schematic diagrams inspired by cognitive linguistics in a computer-based tutorial system called the English Preposition Tutor. Training was designed based on the theoretical framework of the Competition Model and a cognitive linguistic analysis of prepositions. Sixty-four…

This study examines how adult second language learners acquire the different meanings of the Spanish preposition "a". Cognitive linguistic models predict that spatial meanings are acquired first, as they are conceptually basic and are the source from which other meanings derive via natural cognitive mechanisms such as metaphor and…

There is growing research on the linguistic features that most contribute to making second language (L2) speech easy or difficult to understand. Comprehensibility, which is usually captured through listener judgments, is increasingly viewed as integral to the L2 speaking construct. However, there are shortcomings in how this construct is…

The assessments designed for and analyzed in this study used a task-based language design template rooted in theories of language reflecting heteroglossic language practices and funds of knowledge learning theories, which were understood as transforming classroom teaching, learning, and assessment through continua of biliteracy lenses. Using a…

Advancements in technology have greatly influenced how students write, the ways they interact with readers, and the genres they create. In order to reflect real-world writing behaviors in the assessment setting and to be able to generalize test-takers' performance from the assessment to their true writing ability, the current study investigated…