Development and initial validation of productive vocabulary tests for isiZulu, Siswati and English in South Africa

Multilingualism in education is encouraged in South Africa, and children are expected to become bilingual and biliterate during the early primary grades. Much focus has been placed on measuring literacy in children’s first language, often the medium of instruction (MOI), and English, the language typically used as MOI from fourth grade. However, vocabulary development in African contexts is underexplored, owing to the cost of existing English standardized tests, and the comparatively fewer linguistically and contextually appropriate vocabulary assessments in African languages. To address this gap, we document the development of corpus-informed contextually appropriate tests of productive vocabulary in isiZulu, Siswati, and English, which were used for a project evaluation. The initial validation phase included 412 children. Both tests were reliable and were concurrently validated with reading comprehension tests in each language, and oral language skills in English. This study contributes to our understanding of the factors that affect the variation in vocabulary knowledge in an African context, including age, grade repetition, and vocabulary in the other language. Only English vocabulary was affected by the remote rural location of the school. We recommend some modifications to the tests before they are validated further in other populations.

Teaching prosody awareness in spontaneous speech for non-linguistic students

The paper reports on the findings of the study of prosody in teaching spontaneous speech production. Insufficient development of a scientifically based methodology for building oral language skills, taking into account its prosodic characteristics, determines the relevance of the study. The main goal of the research is to correct the methodology of teaching spontaneous learner talk, based on the results of experimental phonetic research. The research methodology is based on an integrated approach using linguistic methods of experimental phonetic research, as well as methods of psychological and pedagogic research. The results of phonetic experiment of 97 monolingual utterances of undergraduate students, non-English majors (total running 190 minutes) show a summary of commonly occurring problems that lead to non-native intonation. These problems are mostly related to improper segmentation, wrong distribution of the utterance stress, incorrect rhythmic organisation of speech, break of intonation continuum, inappropriate intonation patterns and melodic contour. The proposed prosodic focus on teaching spontaneous monologue speech includes the following stages: sensitisation, imitation, reading with prosody and practice activities. Methodological recommendations contain specific proposals for teaching sentence stress, syntagmatic division, pausing, intonation and rhythmics of spontaneous speech.

Assessing the Oral Language Skills of Bi-/Multilinguals

Bilingual/multilingual children who speak two (or more) languages demonstrate variability in their semantic and morphosyntactic knowledge of each of their languages. This impacts their performance on language assessment tasks that tap into knowledge of semantics and morphosyntax. As a result, children from bilingual/multilingual backgrounds tend to be misdiagnosed more often than their monolingual peers. In this chapter, the authors review how best practices in the development of assessments can be applied to bilingual/multilingual language learners. They provide examples of the development and use of language history questionnaires and of assessments of semantics and morphosyntax for bilingual/multilingual populations. The chapter focuses in large part on the development and use of these measures for the US Spanish-English speaking population because the approach has been used for a very large group of children and can inform the development of assessments in other language pairs.

Readiness of Special-Needs Schools in Developing Oral Language Skills Programs for Deaf Students

Limited learning programs in developing spoken language, as well as the inconsistency of teachers in implementing oral language communication, are allegedly the main causes of poor communication skills, especially for hearing impaired students. In contrast to this, oral language skills are a prerequisite for having communication with others. The present study draws attention to receive a description of the school (teacher) readiness in developing oral language skills programs for students with hearing impairment. Conducted through descriptive qualitative method, the current project explores data from the chosen teachers of grade 2, 3, and 4, as well as PKPBI teachers through interviews, observation and documentation study. The data analysis technique is performed through data reduction, data presentation, drawing conclusions and verification. The findings disclosed that the oral language program planning is based on incidental needs analysis. The oral language skills program is still developed separately from the PKPBI program and communication training (either speaking or articulation). Likewise, conversational competence as a basis for developing communication has not become a definite program and is only applied to certain themes. The implementation of the oral language skills program is carried out partially with different learning patterns and methods, namely the global word method and the maternal reflective method (MMR). The teacher’s evaluation was limited to correcting phonemes, repeating simple sentences and once into integrated thematically. The faced constraints are the availability of supporting infrastructure such as PKPBI room and articulation room that have not been optimized and the limited number of speech experts and PKPBI teachers. For such obvious reason, the seriousness and consistency of schools are highly necessary in developing oral language skills programs as the main focus during the learning process at each grade level by providing opportunities for all teachers to possess integration with PKPBI program and thematic articulation training programs using the reflective maternal method (MMR).

Advancing English Language Learners' Speaking Skills Using VoiceThread in Mobile Learning for Russian Tertiary Context

This research examines the effectiveness of using the VoiceThread (VT) application (both web and mobile-based) for the development of oral English skills of Russian university students. The study involved 44 full-time bachelor students in non-linguistic departments. The results were evaluated by on-line questionnaire using SurveyMonkey. The survey indicated that the majority of students agreed that mobile VoiceThread developed their oral language skills (M = 4.75) and they enjoyed using it for language learning (M = 4.13). The novelty of the research lies in a more integral assessment of the entire set of oral linguistic skills as a result of their development using a specific mobile learning platform widely used throughout the world. The results can be used in practice to implement mobile learning platforms for teaching oral language skills to students with basic knowledge of a foreign language.

Development of Reading Comprehension in Bilingual and Monolingual Children—Effects of Language Exposure

The current study aimed at investigating the performance of bilingual children with English as an additional language (EAL) on language and literacy measures compared to monolinguals across the first four years of primary school in the U.K. Moreover, it addressed whether bilinguals and monolinguals’ performance on reading comprehension was consistent with the Simple View of Reading. An additional area of interest was to examine the extent to which use of and exposure to both heritage and majority language affected the development of the children’s reading comprehension in both of their spoken languages. A total of forty bilingual and forty monolingual children were assessed in oral language skills and decoding in Year 1 and Year 3 in primary school. After one school year, they were assessed in oral language skills, decoding, and reading comprehension in Year 2 and Year 4. The results showed that the bilinguals performed better than the monolinguals in decoding in all years, suggesting that exposure to a first language with transparent orthography (Greek) may benefit the development of word reading skills. However, the bilinguals scored lower in oral language skills and reading comprehension than their monolingual peers. This finding underlined the significant role of oral language skills in the development of bilinguals’ reading comprehension. Both oral language skills and decoding contributed to reading comprehension in bilinguals but the effects of oral language skills on reading comprehension were stronger than the effects of decoding. Finally, we found that language use of the minority language outside the home could significantly predict reading comprehension in the minority language, underlining the importance of language exposure through complementary schools and other activities outside the home to the maintenance and development of the heritage language.

Oral Language Skills and Literacy Skills of Malay Children with Dyslexia

Dyslexia can involve among others, difficulties in spoken language. However, there is limited local data on oral language (narrative skills) and literacy skills in children with dyslexia. The relationship between language and literacy is well documented although they involve complicated and non-straightforward processes. There is also evidence suggesting a link between language difficulties with subsequent literacy difficulties. Thus, this study aims to identify and describe the language and literacy skills of Malay children with dyslexia, and to discuss the possible relationships between them. Subjects were six children with dyslexia in the Klang Valley, Malaysia aged 8:0 to 9:11 (mean age, 8:10) who were compared to an age-matched control group (n = 10). The battery of tests administrated was phonological awareness test, language task, narrative, and literacy tasks. Our findings showed that children with dyslexia had generally weaker language and literacy skills than the control group. There were significant differences (p < .05) in grammar understanding, sentence repetition, and reading and spelling at both word and paragraph levels. Pearson correlation between language and literacy was shown to be positive and strong, r = .887, p < .05. The qualitative discussion of the data is presented. Findings from this study would provide useful information to teachers and speech-language therapists in their teaching or planning of appropriate clinical evaluation and management of children with dyslexia.

The impact of COVID-19 on early childhood reading practices

COVID-19 has changed the daily lives of families, impacted on work, social interactions, and mental health. Since spring 2020, parents have been working from home and children have been home from daycare and school. Parents are experiencing stress in an attempt to satisfy the demands of work, family, and COVID-19 concerns. Due to the fact that children have been home from daycare and school, parents have the sole responsibility of caring for and teaching their children until schools are able to fully and effectively meet the needs of educating students in an adapted format. Research provides a wealth of information documenting the advantages of parents reading to their children. Children benefit from read-alouds with parental interaction, and these benefits include an increase in oral language skills, reading comprehension, vocabulary, and an increase in motivation to read. The purpose of this study is to answer two questions: (1) Since parents were home more often with their children, were parents spending more quality time reading to their two-to four-year-old children? This can be defined as reading developmentally appropriate books to their children with their undivided attention; and (2) Since parents were home more often with their two-to four-year-old children, were parents reading more to their young children? Parents of pre-kindergarten students were surveyed to determine the answers to these questions.